Mastodon feed for #emacs tag brought to my attention that there is a blog carnival going on with a prompt being Writing experience.
Impostor syndrome kicks in hard, nevertheless, I’d like to use this opportunity to admit that I gave up and now use the org-mode (even though just in May I was saying nope).
Let’s start from the beginning. I’m a tech person. I knew about Emacs. But I had never tried it. It has a kind of mythical aura around it, something you’d feel intimidated to touch. So I didn’t.
I am also well aware of the editor wars with vim. This one I use sometimes. You don’t really have a choice. Lots of people praise it so much and use vim bindings everywhere else. Thus, I made several attempts at learning more than just a couple of keys, yet it never stuck with me. Bleh.
A month ago, I had to decide which subscription services to continue using. And painfully, I chose not to renew Amazing Marvin. I love it! I wish all the best to the team (Christina, Mark, Branko); you’re great people doing impressive work. But I needed to go. First, I checked the usual alternatives: Remember The Milk, TickTick, Todoist. Nope, nope, and meh.
So, I continued my research. Obscure services, self-hosted options. While nap trapped, I stumbled upon Orgzly in f-droid and learned that it supports:
- different task states: TODO, NEXT, BLOCKED, DONE, CANCELLED, whatever you desire
- separate schedule and due dates
- three repeating patterns: every, after, catch-up (the best pattern ever)
- nested tasks / projects
- pretty good filtering (though not perfect)
Huh. This was exactly what I needed. So, I thought, OK, let’s try the legendary org-mode.
Fast forward two weeks, and I’m writing this post to say how thrilled I am. Emacs is surprisingly noob user friendly. I am not forced to be a keyboard warrior when I just want to sit back and poke with my mouse. Or I’m nap trapped.
And when I want to use a keyboard fully, it feels like spell-casting. I’m mesmerized by Emacs magic incantations. Some say that all the Ctrl’s, Meta’s, and Shift’s are annoying, whereas I find them natural and flowing compared to jumping back and forth between vim modes.
I’ve just started. My config is almost empty: I follow Mastering Emacs advice to learn the vanilla thing first. And there are of course some frustrations:
- The documentation is extensive, yet some parts require deep reading to understand. Skimming through doesn’t work (me struggling with version control docs; magit docs aren’t better).
- Haven’t got to this yet, but I write in Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Apparently, it’s preferable to use Emacs internal language control instead of the system’s one. So I’ll have to rework my hand memory and research good configs.
- Windows and buffers are unpredictable on the surface. In what window a help or a vc buffer appears still surprises me, which is annoying.
- So. Much. To. Learn. It’s a blessing and a curse, I need to make a conscious decision not to chase yet another shiny feature to actually finish the tasks at hand.
Emacs is a big brain and time investment. I’m amazed enough to pursue it, yet I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. For now, I’ll continue using Obsidian for PKM because the mobile app is just easier. There is an Emacs for Android and Orgro, alas, they can’t compete. I recall Logseq supporting org files, but AFAIK it was too restrictive with the structure and I didn’t like the overall UX. Also Karl Voit mentions org support is gonna go anyway.
So, at the moment I mostly use org-mode as a task manager and a calendar. And I use Emacs for my cooklang recipe collection. It ain’t much, but it’s an honest start, right? :)