22 years of Emacs

Back in 1998 I was planning a move to the US. I had just finished my first professional programming gig writing a RAS Dialer for Freeler internet, the first “free” internet provider in The Netherlands. Pretty much everyone in The Netherlands (who had a modem and tried Freeler) was using my software to connect to the service. I was programming in various languages at the time, from Delphi (for the dialer) to Perl (yes, it was popular then!). This is when I first started playing with Linux and editors like Vi and Emacs.

When I moved to the US (San Francisco) I started working for Personify, a company focused on building an analytical platform for e-commerce sites. I started working in a small team which dealt with webserver logfile parsing. That sounds like a great job for Perl, right? My mentor worked in the same team and he guided me through the hectic time of working at a pre-2000 startup in Silicon Valley.

As I was working closely with my mentor I started picking up on things he did. He was (and probably still is) a wizard behind the keyboard. He used Emacs as his editor. Naturally I gave it a try, but found it hard to really get productive with it and so I kept switching back and forth between Vi, Emacs and several other editors. It always amazed me how quick he was in getting stuff done. One day, my mentor told me to stop and take the time to learn my tools.

His reasoning was that when you learn your tool well it will not impede you from completing your task. You will be able to complete it as fast as you can simply because the tool becomes an extension of your thought process and it is possible to leverage the features it has to the benefit of the task at hand. It did not matter which tool I would choose, but pick one and learn it well. I accepted the challenge of working with a single tool for 30 days and see if my work speed would improve.

I chose to use Emacs, as it allowed me to look at the things he did. The availability of information on how to best use software was not as abundant as it is now. Now you can look up anything on YouTube or any blog, back then there was the Emacs Manual and other users that I ran into during technical meetups.

Now we are 22 years later and I still use Emacs everyday for pretty much anything. It has been with me through transitioning from Windows, to macOS and since 2017 full time on Linux. It came with me when moving between continents (back to Europe) and through various jobs at different companies.

I too have been tempted by new fashioned shiny tools that promised to be the next big thing in Editing. I even switched to Vim for a little while. The thing is, I always came back to Emacs. I think this is mostly due to the fact that new tools have something spectacular and then you want to adjust it and you find you can not do it to the degree that Emacs allows you to change the way it works for you.

While working with programming languages like Java the lure of IDEs has been quite tempting as well. In teams where pretty much everyone uses IntelliJ IDEA you stand out when just opening up Emacs. It often results in quite some interesting discussions as to what “makes a good developer”. Some people are quite unreasonable and think an IDE makes the developer, but I greatly disagree on that topic.

Over the years there have been several serendipitous moments in the Emacs community for me. I will pick out 2:

• I started sponsoring Jonas Bernoulli in 2021 for his work on Magit and back in 2012 he sent in a patch for my worklog package which I only found out while preparing this article and looking at the logs of my various projects.
• I was referenced in a talk by Martin Clausen. He gave a presentation on a Clojure project and in the conclusion he talked about knowing your tools. We had been doing some live streams together working on Clojure projects and while he talked about using your tools effectively he casually dropped a “then you need to talk to this guy” and pointed my out in the crowd.