I’ve tried a couple of times to try to write a recurring series here, and this is going to be my latest (hopefully not failed) attempt. I present, Life with Emacs, a walk through Emacs through the eyes of someone still trying to learn all of the important keybindings. Each week, I’ll look at a particular task I’ve been using Emacs for, and along with it hopefully provide some other newbies some insight into what I’m going through.

As far as backgrounds in editors go, I’ve pretty much been a GUI / Vim guy for as long as I can remember. I know enough Vim to get in and out of a file relatively quickly, but for any heavy coding, I’ve leaned on an IDE to help me out. I figured I would try out Emacs for a few reasons. One, there’s plenty of Emacs users at work I can bother with questions. Two, there are a lot of potentially useful modes that might actually be able to help me organize myself at work. Finally, I want to break down and learn the ins and outs of one editor, and I’ve chosen Emacs to focus on. Will I stick with it? Time, and my patience, will tell the tale. I plan to use Emacs in place of other editors that I had been using to create scratch notes as I work on things at work, and also plan to use it to do the occasional scripting / web maintenance that I’m tasked to do.

Next week I’ll present the beginnings of my little Emacs cheatsheet and will dive into the first task I’ll look at, which is note-taking in my work environment.