# Emacs

I learned Emacs in 2021 for reasons I don't quite remember. I had touched Emacs toolkits like Spacemacs[0] and Doom Emacs[1] over the course of some years prior, but they never left me satisfied. I even forced myself to use Emacs's built-in keybindings versus the vi keybindings that I was comfortable with.

Eventually, I discovered regexes in vi and went back in that direction, but vi-like editors couldn't satisfy me forever. Emacs is not just a nice text editor, but a very great UI toolkit and desktop environment.

I had switched back to Windows yet again a week ago, but my heart wanted me to go back to Linux. Debian had been my distro of choice for a good few years in the late 2010s, but I fell under the sway of influencers who were more Arch fans in that time period into the 2020s. I didn't have a good reason to leave Debian then, if I'm being honest.

Debian was the natural distro of choice given that I wanted full-disk encryption and my heart was one touched by Free Software[2].

I chose Emacs because it didn't seem too hard to add LSP support and I could get a recent version of Emacs if I needed from backports.

Consider that foreshadowing.

=> https://git.sr.ht/~starbreaker/emacs-config I stole from Matthew Graybosch's Emacs configuration very extensively.

=> https://starbreaker.org Why his? He's an Emacs user with a website I like. Not a very deep reason, I'm afraid.

=> https://github.com/progfolio/elpaca I modified his configuration to work with Elpaca. It didn't work, and I eventually gave up.

=> https://github.com/radian-software/straight.el I modified his configuration to work with straight.el, figuring Elpaca's asynchronous nature and lack of dependency management were the culprits. That too didn't work, and I gave up.

I used the standard package.el his configuration used, and it worked. Until I hit a point where I needed to upgrade to the 28.3 in the standard stable repos to the 29.4 in the backports repos.

And the addiction to configuring Emacs got worse from there. I then decided to use EXWM with some niceties.

I fell back in love with a platform I had used. Vertico needed less configuration than I remembered, basically working out of the box. This actually made using search and replace feel not much slower, if at all, than how vi, vis and sam, and kakoune and Helix did their search and replace.

I hope I stay for good this time.

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=> ./20250304-still-happy-with-emacs.gmi Update: I've written a follow-up to this post because I'm amazed that I am still so happy a month and a half in!

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=> https://www.spacemacs.org/ [0]
=> https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs [1] 
[2]: I feel that Free Software and the Veg{etari,}an movements are quite similar ones. This includes the annoying sorts who demand purity. To compare the FSF to PETA would be very apt indeed. I don't claim them, even without the documentation of Stallman's less savoury ideas, imposed poor working conditions at the FSF, and, most worryingly, cult leader status, even if accidental. I'm an Emacs user, not a corporate cultist.