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Emacs Update

Now that I’ve been using Emacs for a while, I’m finding that my reflexes are adjusting to the Emacs way. On the bright side, I can still jump back into Vim and be productive.

A recent blog post highlighted the areas that I still need to explore.

I’m finding the deeper I dive into Emacs use, the more there is to find. The idea of a 30 day challenge to use nothing but Emacs is going a bit far, however I do find myself using it for more and more things.

Originally my focus was on Clojure, due to the great Lisp integration. I even have the keyboard shortcuts for Paredit mode as the background image on my screen. Now, I also use it for note taking and for organising ideas before preparing presentations. Rails coding is also emacs friendly.

A pleasant surprise is just how many controls and tools support emacs key bindings. Almost every textbox on Mac OS X for example. Typically, I make use of Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E to jump to the beginning and ends of lines, and Ctrl-D to forward delete a character.

The one area I still tend to fall back to Vim with is managing servers. I think I need some more practice with keyboard combos on terminals. I am also still to really learn emacs’ lisp.

Overall, I’m very happy with the switch.