Curious Chase

Curiously Chase

Getting Started With Emacs

Share on Twitter

As of 2019, I no longer use Emacs. I wanted a better shared developer experience with my teammates, so I switched to VS Code

I have been using Emacs for a month (as of this post) and it would be a Herculean task for any other editor to pull me away from it!

At the beginning of December 2016, I joined a new team at Walmart Labs writing Go to optimize the request/response lifecycle. I was having a conversation with one of my new teammates (Shane Hansen, who's an awesome go developer) about which editors we used.

I used Vim. He used Emacs.

I'd been using Vim for over 4 years religiously and that was the moment that I realized that he was the first emacs user I've ever met. It led me to ask, "why have I never given Emacs a try?"

That night I googled "Emacs" and started my journey down the rabbit hole and haven't come back out of it since...in fact, I've given up on considering other editors because Emacs is the best editor for me.

Why I'm using Emacs

I've tried a number of editors (Coda, Sublime, Atom, VS Code and clearly Vim) but have never been able to leave vim because I always felt so darn productive using it.

Even though I knew I'd be sacrificing my initial productivity, there were a few major reasons I was willing to try out Emacs:

and one minor reason...

If You're Considering Giving Emacs a Shot...

Here's some advice I'd like to give you if you're willing to try out Emacs:

Share on Twitter