 So about a month ago I Decided that I was going to give a serious try to emacs and I've made a couple of videos about it since then and I have some final thoughts because For the most part I'm now done with emacs and it's not really because emacs is horrible So I'm just gonna get that out of the way spoiler alert. I don't think emacs is bad. It's just not for me So this is gonna be a little bit of a rambly video I have some notes and anybody who's watched the channel for any amount of time knows that me taking notes is pretty odd But I have some notes and I'm just gonna kind of ramble my way through this because everybody knows that when I do take notes I don't follow them. So it's gonna be a mess. But anyways, so let's just start off with this the biggest thing I have Against emacs at least for my personal use is that I don't have a need for it because I'm not a developer. I'm not a programmer. I don't Have a specific need that emacs can fill that them Doesn't already fill for me. So most of the code work that I do is either For racing or managing my window managers, which is a big part of it But also a few hobby things where I'm going through and learning different languages. So right now I'm dabbling in Python and I don't really need like a full-fledged IDE or anything for like that. So I just needed us a basic text editor That's the need that I really need filled from a program like emacs or vim And that was my overall overwhelming experience with emacs is that I just ended up using it like them and There's not a huge problem with that. Like if you are just going to Use emacs that way It fills that purpose perfectly fine like with do me max, which is what I ended up downloading you can use Emacs or do me max just like them. I mean the key bindings are most of the same Now there's a whole bunch of extra key bindings and key cords and stuff like that They go through and do a ton of other stuff and I'll get to that in a minute But if you just wanted to use it like them, it'd be fine. But honestly the biggest problem I had with this entire experiment was that You're not supposed to use emacs in the terminal and that's the way I shared it out doing it was like I started out using the emacs terminal version because that's where I do all of my Coding or whatever it's where I always use Vim it's where it's just my habit of you know I'm usually in the terminal anyways moving files around doing whatever and then when I need to edit one of them I just stay in the terminal using Vim or Neo Vim in my case So when I started using emacs, that's where I decided that I wanted to use it because that was comfortable for me But that's not the way you're supposed to use emacs You're supposed to use the GUI client and that was a completely different I mean it was like trying to change muscle memory because I'm so used to just being in the terminal all the time doing Stuff to have to then go out of the terminal and Go into emacs because I wasn't in emacs all the time Anyways, like and then find the file that I was working you know looking at in the terminal then do the editing there It was it's added this entire extra step and it was just not a great experience now I understand that people who get invested in the emacs ecosystem can do all of their terminal stuff and all of their Moving of files around inside of emacs, but that's not the experience that I want If I'm going to do stuff in the command line, I'm going to use a terminal. I'm going to use a Lackardy It's my terminal choice emacs is never going to replace that for me. It's just not because it's not a good experience I don't want to have My terminal experience to be baked in with everything else that emacs does. It's just not what I want from a program and that was my biggest stumbling block is trying to figure out how To kind of meld these two workflows where I spend all my time in the terminal But also have to then leave the terminal to use emacs to edit the files and stuff that I needed to edit And that's not it wasn't a great experience for me Another thing that I found was that there's just too much stuff going on in emacs now If you ask emacs aficionados people who really enjoy using emacs or doom emacs any of the flavors They'll tell you that emacs isn't bloated. It's just a lisp interpreter That has a whole bunch of stuff built on top of it That's fair enough technically. That's 100% true. It's just like Linux is not technically an operating system It's just a kernel and it has a whole bunch of stuff that's built on top of it That's the way a lot of open-source stuff is and technically that's true But I always go into emacs feeling overwhelmed because there's it's not While it may technically be true that it's just a lisp interpreter Really when you go into emacs you get the feeling that it has so much stuff I mean it has org mode. It has you know, just the regular text editing mode It has a ton of programming stuff. It has org mode It has all these plugins and that's not stuff that you built on top of it. That's all stuff. That's included. So like it has games installed by default like So technically yes Emacs is a lisp or a lisp interpreter wherever it is, but it also has all this cruft on top of it and your experience isn't just that it's a An interpreter for language, but that it's an entire ecosystem of stuff I'm not one of those guys who is Against bloat, you know, like I'm not If there's a program out there that I want to use and it's considered bloated by the the meme guys I don't care as long as it does the thing that I wanted to do. I can just ignore the stuff that's on top of it, right? but with emacs I always felt like I wasn't using it to its full potential and It's true that I wasn't I was just using it as a text editor or a code editor And there's so much more the emacs can do And it almost makes me feel guilty for not using that stuff, right? And it's It's like you want to use a program for its full potential like because everybody Proclaims the glories that is org mode, right? And I wanted to get into our mode So I spent some time in org mode and it's good and it's cool But it's not for me because it doesn't fit in with my established workflow all of my Workflow right now is especially with when it comes to notes and stuff is built into VimWiki Now you can do everything you want from VimWiki inside org mode and org Rome and all this stuff It's perfectly capable of doing so, but I already have my established workflow in VimWiki and I had to transfer all over which is fine, but I always felt like I was gonna get distracted by other things in Emacs when I when I want to take a note. I just want to open up VimWiki and go I don't want to have to navigate through all this other Stuff and I can't like you don't actually have to see the games and stuff like that But it was in the back of my mind and there was Just an extraneous number of key bindings that you have to learn and it's it was it's a mess, right? It's not a great experience Now the key bindings thing is is a whole different beast because as far as I can tell There are very few places where you can go and just see a list of key bindings Now if you go do me max has fantastic documentation It's like really good documentation you go to the GitHub and they have pages after pages of Stuff for you to read. It's like a freaking novel The problem is I'm a lazy dude, right? Like I don't want to have to go through and read a novel for my text editor I really don't know. I mean Vim is the same way right Vim has a huge Swalf of documentation that you can go through and read and So it has the same problem as e-max but what I desperately want is a list of key bindings in e-max because at least with Vim you can go through and search for Key bindings on the internet for Vim and they'll tell you What do you want to do and you can go through Vim tutor and stuff like it and learn the basics and stuff again And there's an e-max tutor that you can go through and do that stuff But the problem with e-max is that there are so many different variants and they all have different key bindings, right? And the thing with do me max is that it has Vim stuff in it like you can navigate your documents and stuff with them But it also has all the e-max Key bindings as stuff as well So it's kind of like an amalgamation of love key bindings and it gets really confusing over which guide you should use and You know, sure you go to the e-max or do me max documentation and it has all the stuff there But if you want to find an easy tutorial like that has just like a list of key bindings A lot of that stuff is crap on the internet and we all know it all those tutorials are Some of them are for vanilla e-max some of them are for space max and for do me max Some of them don't know what the hell they are and it's just a mess. So finding help was a little bit hard as well so At the end of the day, I just didn't enjoy my experiments with e-max I Spent a whole month with it and even after a month. I still stumble over a lot of the key bindings I like I know quite a few of them now, but and I think if I continue to use it I would continue to get better and learn some more and I'd eventually learn how to customize those key bindings to something that would be more to my liking because I'm not you know, I've done that with them, but I Didn't actually go through and do that with e-max and maybe I should have But I just didn't enjoy it like that the thing about them is every time I open up them and Accomplish something that's cool. I feel a sense of I feel rewarded like When I learned how to use macros and Vim I was really excited because that's like it's a really cool Functionality and it's kind of makes you like yeah, I'm a vim pro now Like I'm not a vim pro now, but you know it makes you feel like you're doing something really cool In e-max it always felt like a task like it felt like a chore to do Pretty much anything that was outside of just standard text editing and it does that well It does text editing well because I was using it was just vim for me I was just using them basically but I had to but it added the extra step of going out of the terminal and into a GUI client so it was I Just didn't enjoy it right that is that's I think that's the the ultimate conclusion of This entire experience is that I didn't enjoy it and if you've watched videos over the last couple weeks You'll notice that a lot of times I just had screw it and opened up them like it Vim is such an ingrained part of my workflow of doing everything I do for the channel even A lot of the writing that I now do for my main job is done inside of them And that's where I enjoy being and I tried to transfer a lot of that stuff over to e-max But what I found was that not only did I enjoy it, but the only times that I was truly successful in doing a lot of that stuff was when I Forced myself to start in e-max if I was already in the terminal Which is what you saw a lot in in the videos that I did previously to this where I was like when I raced xmonad Most of everything that I did there in terms of editing stuff was already in I was already in the terminal So I just opened up them The only times I was successful in actually forcing myself to use e-max is when I started in e-max with the intention of doing something so you start up on that beginning screen and you Go into dear ed and you find your file and then you edit it and stuff and it's great and then you can go through and use something like vterm to navigate through your file structure and Move things around and you can do all the stuff and the times that I was most successful in using e-max Was when I forced myself to start there and Like I said when I was already in the terminal I wasn't I found it harder and harder to force myself to leave to go to E-max when it was just way easier to type the letter v and enter or v and then the you know the file name And then enter, you know, it's just so much easier that way So the last thing to cover is what happens next now. I did not spend as much time as I would have liked with org mode I think org mode is really cool And I think there's a ton of features and a ton of stuff there that I just didn't get a chance to play around with So there's a good chance that I will spend a little bit of time In the months ahead with org mode And I did not get a chance to try org roam At all and I want to try that as well because it looks really really neat And I want like said I want to spend some really good quality time with it and I think that If I use e-max in that way where it's just like an application for org mode That might be an okay thing for me if I end up deciding that I want to use org mode I don't know whether or not I will uh, I really am entrenched with then wiki So we'll see how that goes. But anyways, that's really what happens next In terms of the rest of it. I'm just going to use them I mean them is just it's my happy place And I don't think that there's anything wrong with that And I'm glad that I had the experience with e-max that I have had in the last month It's given me a lot more knowledge over why people like it I think that there's a ton of stuff there that people can enjoy and that if you can Tailor your workflow to what e-max does it could be really good for a lot of people That are into that way of working. But if you are a vim guy if you if you are Dedicated to using vim if you've gone through and spent these hours and hours, you know Maybe months and months learning all the vim stuff Moving away from that after all that effort and going into something else Which you have to put an equal number of time amount of time in I don't think it's worth it for most people I just don't I if if you're in that situation, which is was that It took me a long time To get to the point where I can say I can use them now And there's still a ton of stuff like I watched some of these vim guys like the the Primogen who's that his name? He's like a he's like a vim youtuber And he goes through and does this amazing stuff with them right and it's just like he's a god at them I look at that like I want to be that guy when I grow up. I'm nowhere near that like but Compared to where I was say three years ago when I was like, how the hell do you quit them? Like I don't know how to quit them, you know I was one of those guys like that's where everybody starts at them. It's how do you get out of it and But compared to that from where I'm now I'm much more comfortable with them and the thing about emacs is that I think that I'd have to spend an equal amount of time in emacs as I did in then like years and years To get comfortable in it Tailor it to my particular workflow And then maybe I'd be happy in it, right that that could be possible, but I don't That the the thing with vim and like I said before earlier Is that even when I first started out in vim every time I learned something new I had a very Deep sense of accomplishment for from learning that thing and it was like, oh man, that's really cool I never had that sense with with emacs. It just always felt like a chore to me Maybe it's because I prefer things to do in the terminal. Maybe it's because Uh, my beloved key chords failed me in this like I love key chords. So you think that I mean emacs is nothing but key chords That's what it has, right? You think that I love those You know, I love it because I love key chords, but it just seemed Some of the key chords were like Three long like it was really weird and I would everything just everything felt like a chore in max. So Like I said, I it was a rambly video. I probably could go on for around the 20 minutes just with some some of my more Uh weird experiences getting it, you know Trying to get it tailored to my work flow But I think I'll probably just go ahead and wrap it up here for for now I'm done with emacs I'm gonna spend like I said, I'm gonna spend some time with org mode But I'm gonna take a few weeks off and just kind of cuddle with my with my vim install for a while Maybe add some key bindings or something because I I I I missed them even though I've been using it for you know all along, right? Anyway, so that is it for this video If you've tried emacs or a flavor of emacs and have had a good or bad experience leave that in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you. Make sure you like comment and subscribe all that stuff I really do appreciate everybody who's has hit that red button You can also follow me on odyssey and mask it on those links will be in the video description You can follow me on twitter at the linux cast you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast Before I go I'd like to take them thing my current patrons Devon chris east coast web gen 2 is fun too patrick l primus marcus meglon jackson ebb and tool Steve a city mitral art center merit camp josh really j dog the bsd's rock and peter a thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time