M. Wunsch

It's been one year since I started writing code every weekday. I just started committing stuff and haven't stopped. I take the occasional break.

In that time I've rebuilt my personal website, picked up Emacs as my primary text editor, open sourced a Ruby feature flag library, started writing a weekly newsletter in code, learned Clojure, and wrote a program that procedurally generates music. Now I'm messing around with AWS infrastructure as code.

In the wake of the inspiring Indie Web Camp NYC, I set up my POSSE system so I can publish photo posts to Jekyll that are syndicated to Tumblr.

After an extended getting-to-know-you period and a lot of false starts, I am now using Emacs as my preferred text editor. I came from Vim. I accept that I will be branded as a heretic by some. I accept that I will be branded as a Johnny-come-lately by others. I accept that there are those that will just look at me and think, "Oh great another neck-bearded eccentric weirdo." To all I say, "YOLO."

To say that I am now using Emacs as my "preferred text editor" is dancing around the edge of truth. Really, I am using Emacs as my preferred base of operations, from which anything and everything could begin including text editing. There's lots of old variations on an old joke about Emacs being an operating system and oh! how it makes us chuckle. It's true. The joke is truth.

I moved away from Vim because I was always context switching. ^Zing my way to command line tools and fging back. Copying text into a special register so that I could pbpaste it through some pipeline. The plurality of Unix is admirable and beautiful but I want it right there with me in the pocket of my editor ready for my flow state to embrace. Extend Vim? I'd rather not I mean have you seen VimL? Yes there's Neovim and that seems like a really promising project. But... but I've seen things. I've seen things people do with Emacs that is impressive. People I respect use Emacs. And of course, there's the Lisp.

Oh the Lisp. The Parenthesis. The REPLs. It's all here and it's all fantastic and it's so powerful to treat the text you're editing as a living breathing abstract syntax tree. Glorious Lisp. It was Clojure that really brought me to Emacs.

Clojure and Evil. If I ever miss the editing productivity of Vim, I can put it inside of Emacs.

You can find my Emacs preferences and customizations here: https://github.com/mwunsch/emacs.d

In that repository's README I've outlined my process for learning Emacs. Some special shoutouts tho:

Mickey Peteresen's Mastering Emacs is a fantastic resource. Read the website and buy the ebook.

I rely on Projectile day-to-day.

Magit can be a better git than git.