Emacs

Why Emacs:

Truly customizable and extensible

I can shape my editor into a tool that fits me, instead of contorting myself to fit someone else’s UI design.

Once you get the hang of it (and especially with a bit of help from LLMs), modifying emacs becomes easy and fun.

Emacs is really fun!

That’s the main reason I like it!
Fun is a signal, not frivolity.
Fun is leads to flow, and flow leads to deep work and curiosity and creativity.
All of this leads to more productivity.

Better than a clicking based GUI or a CLI:

I also find that the transient menu style interface works fits much better in my brain than CLI or standard click-on-dropdown-menu based GUIs.

Stuff that I use frequently becomes muscle memory, and for stuff that I don’t use frequently I get gentle, immediate and usually useful hints from the system about what I’m trying to do.
(And if the hints consistently aren’t useful they can be changed without too much effort.)

This applies to:

Magit
Dired
M-x anything

Great Aesthetics

All-encompassing

Emacs can absorb pretty much all parts of your workflow into the same extensible system.

Favorite features:

Org mode:

Org babel as a replacement for jupyter notebooks

Literate code! Literate dev-ops!

Version controlled jupyter notebooks!

Mix latex and python and bash and rust and etc. in the same file.

Here’s an example of an org babel file as a generic data science notebook!
Here’s what it looks like when published to html.

Seriously this is great – it’s changed my life.

Org todos / agenda

I love that I can collect todos from my org babel notebooks! No more running todo lists, org just collects them in their natural contexts.

Org publish:

I can take all my notes, with code and diagrams and latex, and easily publish them to the Internet. That’s how this webpage is generated, and it only takes a few lines of config to get going.

Cool features:
- I can drop todos in my webpage org files and have them hidden by default by visible in my agenda.

yassnippets

They’re a great way to optimize writing code. It’s feels nice to have yas snippets that work smoothly together, like typing at a higher level of abstraction.

See this inspiring fast latex input via snippets.

Magit

I don’t think I would have learned git so thoroughly without magit. I love having all the options clearly available to me, it makes visualizing staging hunks of code clear, and it simplifies rebasing by having all the information visible and/or automatically loaded based on cursor location.

Dired/dirvish

wdired is magic – I love being able to treat things that don’t feel editable as editable, actually. (Consult-ripgep embark has the same flavor.)
! or & then command (e.g. firefox) on the highlighted file(s) = yay
it’s also smart about guessing what you want to do!
Tab on a file or a folder!
M for changing permissions
Mapping W to dired-do-eww
Bookmarks for your file system

Config:

Here’s my emacs config!