💾 Archived View for tilde.pink › ~fzzyyti › gemlog › 8-13-2021.gmi captured on 2022-04-29 at 14:00:06. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Trying out Emacs... Finally

After stumbling across the Gemini protocol, I was interested to hear some people talking about it, instead of just reading about it, like usual. So I tried looking it up on YouTube. I found a channel called DistroTube, who's host spent a lot of time trying out Emacs. I think he ended up deciding not to use it in the end, but I found the whole concept intriguing when hearing someone talk about all the things it can do.

It turns out that a lot of the things I like to do on the computer, such as writing, coding for fun, doing some basic communication, browsing the small web, can all be done within one instance of emacs. And it can also do anything else you can imagine. This is because of the power of ELisp. I have always been interested in learning languages that are not algol/c based. Emacs seems like an opportunity to dig into a dialect of Lisp and get some instant feedback and satisfaction.

I haven't cracked open the hood to have some fun with Emacs as a Lisp interpreter just yet. I'm trying to figure out the basic concepts and how the program was designed to be used, but I will get to that soon. Whether I enjoy messing around with ELisp will be the determining factor for whether I keep using it, or just dabble for a while.

Here are my first impressions

Pros

Everything is a buffer and you can interact with mail, chat, shell output, git, etc. with the same key bindings and concepts.
Basically everything I do on the computer for fun can be done in emacs
ELisp and the prospect of full customization is intriguing.

Cons

Emacs seems to be best on the X Windows system, and I don't have, or necessarily want, any Linux installation with an X Windows system.
Terminal emulators are excellent for working on remote systems, such as tildes, VPSs, and old/small computers I don't want to hook peripherals to. That's the way I prefer to -work- play right now. After all, I'm currently using a mechanical keyboard and an old tablet, writing with the tools installed on tilde.pink.

Conclusion

Could I be doing anything less productive than learning a productivity environment designed before I was born? (I wasn't born that recently either).