🌎 Up to my neck in Emacs

🌎 Up to my neck in Emacs

If there's one thing I'm good at, it's failing to stop using Emacs.

It was only a couple of months ago that I tried moving to visual tools for my notes. Everything was done in giant Curio project boards or Tinderbox maps. No more giant walls of text for me!

Around that time, I moved my blog back to Hugo, and was reminded that I had built a nice workflow around creating new posts using Emacs. I still use Emacs for my journal, which means it's always already open, so a quick M-x jab/hugo-new-post and I was off and running.

Now that I was journaling and blogging in Emacs again, everything else I used to do was right there. Emacs is insidious, so how could I ignore all this?:

• Years of org-mode notes using Denote's naming convention
• Dated folders of notes using the new-to-me Howm package
• File management functions I'd written for Dired
• Fancy task management using Org-agenda
• Email via Mu4e
• Magit for git
• Org-attach for handling project-related files
• Dozens of capture templates for adding stuff

It occurred to me that to abandon all that experience, history, and muscle memory was…not smart. Emacs does just about anything one could need when it comes to text, and can be wrangled to do nearly anything else. And Org-mode beats the pants off Markdown.

I had a system that worked, so I've decided to keep it.

—Jack Baty