This Time Is Going to Be Different. I Hope. - Emacs Long Term Review

[@TheLinuxCast]

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[@MarioRabe]

The church of emacs will always welcome you again my friend

[@fab8652]

It's common for people in the Emacs community to start their journey with Doom/Spacemacs, as they get more comfortable with the configuration, elisp and Emacs in general, then dabble into vanilla Emacs, some for good, but many others end up going back to the big distros, having gained a greater appreciation for the amount of effort they entail. Best of luck on your Emacs journey, Matt, I hope you find it as rewarding as I did!

[@GazzJ82]

When you learn how to configure vanilla emacs you won't need doom emacs. You will find out that doom emacs is like running Ubuntu and removing the desktop environments just to install a window manager. You should have just started with a debian base in the first place. Make sure you follow the system crafters "emacs from scratch" videos and you will learn everything you need to know even tho the videos are a little dated.

[@anthonybeyond]

And if you have KDE Plasma as your current desktop environment, just use Kate and forget about [Neo]Vim & Emacs already. :)

[@rikhardfsoss]

so next is awesomewm again :D regarding emacs, i really like it because of org mode and all it's exporting capability. i write everything as org mode and then export to md or txt or other such as odf.

[@mihaipauldtru]

@@rikhardfsoss Totally agree, org is a rabbit hole of its own with stuff like org-agenda, org-roam and more. I'll add in org-node as a lightweight alternative to org-roam.

[@yothebob8162]

Im a simple man, I see emacs and I like. I picked up vanilla emacs about 2-3 years ago. I just did the tutorial on the home screen with an open mind. it took me about a month of using to start grasping it.

[@alooy333]

System crafter has a very solid tutorial for eMacs from scratch

[@capability-snob]

Some recommendations for your first month enjoying vanilla emacs: Do the tutorial (linked from the start page) and get comfortable with the basic movement commands C-[a e f b n p] and intermediate movement commands C-v, M-v, M-

[@LibreGlider]

There is but one true editor, and its name is Emacs. And remember, Vi Vi Vi is the editor of the beast...

[@ObjectsCountries]

i just now got the vi vi vi joke,,,,i thought it was a chant of some sort lol

[@LibreGlider]

@@ObjectsCountries I'm but a humble servant of The Church of Emacs. May St IGNUcius (peace be upon him) watch over my config files...

[@tttakkkumi]

I don’t get it… can u explain?

[@chopin4525]

​@@tttakkkumi VI VI VI is 6 6 6 in roman numerals.

[@biblebot3947]

@@tttakkkumivi is the Roman numeral for 6

[@infinitivez]

I know nearly nothing about emacs, but would love to see how you go about modding it, what stands out as necessary mods, what is just personal taste, etc.

[@sho6501]

me too i love watching him talk about stuff he did

[@sterben4958]

Distrotube has a lot of amazing videos about emacs he’s your best source of info

[@torspedia]

Especially Doom Emacs.

[@alexisdumas84]

System Crafters is a lot better

[@Sevenhens]

Honestly Emacs just clicked when I bound caps lock to ctrl. All the finger fatigue went away and the key binds more intuitive. Just follow the tutorial of vanilla Emacs. Evil mode is good but it kinda still needs some emacs bindings and you might get confused when things go wrong. Some modes are straight up a pain in the ass in evil mode. Vanilla is in a good state now just enable project.el, eglot, and add the doom packages one by one like doom themes and doom modeline.

[@fleurcode]

A good channel for tutorials of Emacs is System Crafters

[@attilasedon9593]

That's where I learned how to use Emacs.

[@sigillinux]

good luck matt , you have clearly gained much penguin knowledge and power since then I think you will be fine.

[@krid78]

You are simply awesome! I had to laugh so hard. At the end of my studies I was a Gentoo user with WindowMaker as window manager and Vim as the only editor. My first job was in HDL design and there I worked on a SUN workstation with FVWM and EMACS. It was hell! Maybe you should extend your challenge and use FVWM while you are still using X11. 😀

[@alexstone691]

I started using emacs for third time, mostly cause of compile-mode which works great for container-focus workflow but i challanged myself to not use any external package, so pure emacs experience and honestly i learned a lot and its quite cool and useable (a lot easier to use than pure neovim which needs quite a lot of plugins for basic LSP functionality) I still have neovim configured with all the LSPs etc but i am thinking of rewriting it to be vanilla as possible

[@sEekAndDesTroy0202]

Awesome! I'm looking forward to this. Also I really like the way you approach this starting from scratch vanilla emacs.

[@johanb.7869]

Congrats on the 60.000 subs😎

[@BonFromageTech]

Genuinely curious to see how this goes. I always see DT singing the praises of Doom Emacs, and while it looks pretty cool, it does seem like a LOT of work to get configured properly. Best of luck!

[@alexisdumas84]

If you want a fully featured obsidian-like experience using emacs, you're probably going to want org mode and org roam. But if you're tied to markdown, then you can get something simpler but similar in general functionality that's compatible with markdown using Prot's Denote.

[@luis_alex_rs]

Enjoy the trip! ❤️

[@intermarer9145]

I wrote a bunch of tips, but I'm realizing it's hopeless to try share all the good stuff, you just have to discover them as you go. Emacs is a journey; a way of life. The longer you stick with it, the better it gets. I would recommend building your own config instead of using someone else's (Doom) and also learn the default bindings. Your Emacs will look, feel, and behave completely different a year from now. I hope you also give org-mode a proper shake. For me, that's like half of Emacs. But maybe it should be it's own separate video series or something? Anyways, good luck!

[@Prodigal2513]

Your haircut looks great!

[@AhmedFaisal13]

Nice haircut btw :) you needed that badly after the Bluefin video 😃 No really, I waited sch a review to see your take on emacs. I made an even weirder endeavor myself when I made Eclipse my main python editor 😄

[@reece2080]

youve got this matt!

[@Z1g0l]

That's an interesting idea for series review. See you soon!

[@Euphorya]

Honestly, give vanilla emacs keybinds a shot. They are actually pretty good, and you can get just as fast as you are with vim keybinds.

[@keenancarey7041]

I just installed emacs last night. Never done any kind of text editing that required me to use anything more than nano. I'm just super interested in how this whole ecosystem works.

[@lairizzle]

LOL i just watched primeagen react to your i quit vim video

[@anthonybeyond]

Good thing Nano & Micro exist for some of us that want to use a text editor to do a few simple things and THAT IS IT! :)

[@FrankJonen]

Going from zero is more than I was willing to do. Started with Spacemacs, lost patience because it’s slow. Tried Doom, stuck with it. The evil mode means I can jump from neovim (nvchad) to Emacs and back with almost no friction.

[@stevechan5315]

And there is Viper-mode builtin, if you want to use vim keybinding, just use it.

[@xaviduds]

matt my only issue with emacs is that tutorials are deprecated and getting info is hard, how do you do it?

[@fab8652]

I also started using Emacs with that mentality of "where are all the tutorials!?!?" but pretty soon I learned how self-discoverable and well documented everything in Emacs is and in my opinion that's one of the very first things someone wanting to learn Emacs needs to do, getting comfortable with the `help-*` commands and taking full advantage of them, don't get me wrong there are great tutorials out there, even the outdated ones are more-often-than-not relevant today, Emacs is almost 50yo, but tutorials only will get you so far.

[@sterben4958]

Distrotube has lots of great video

[@sentinel9651]

The best resource is Emacs' own manual. That's how I learned it. It's available in different formats on its website and it's always up-to-date with the latest version of the software.

[@xaviduds]

@@sentinel9651 @fab8652 thanks for the help, will try it again

[@averagetechnologyenojyer]

Woah your keyboard looks terrific!

[@HikuNoir]

I know how you feel; I've been stuck inside EXWM for almost an entire year.

[@martinvandenbroek2532]

Avoid using evil-mode and stick with the default GNU-readline library key bindings that are used in many other GNU (e.g. GNU-bash) and non-GNU tools as well. Once you master these key bindings you are able to start enjoying GNU-Emacs a.k.a vanilla Emacs. Good luck with your journey 👍🏽

[@kenneth_mata]

Can't recommend enough the helpful and which-key packages

[@alexisdumas84]

Oh yeah. Which Key and Helpful are HUUUGE. Highly recommended.

[@uuu12343]

With most editors, you *can* choose to use it for 6 months, by the 3rd or so you can get used to it With emacs, good luck using it until the 6th mark - you need all 6 to even get decent

[@NreKonkoro-vt2fo]

I started with Doom Emacs as a helix user because of org-mode + evil collection. In the weekends I'm gonna be doing vanilla emacs because Doom Emacs kind of makes things a lititle bit confusing when it comes to acually understanding how Emacs is configured.

[@ryebread095]

As someone who doesn't spend all his time in the terminal, I have yet to find a compelling reason to not just use Nano. It just works out of the box, I don't need to use a special version of it or spend hours messing with config files to get it right.

[@strayling1]

I hated emacs, but it was the standard where I worked so I had to put up with it. One small modification to make it suck less followed another until after a couple of years I had it fitting like a glove. Then I switched jobs and lost my config file :(

[@92redferrari]

Gave you a like as always 😊. Simple point whats eMacs?

[@ringo8410]

Right off the bat for me would be the blindingly white 'vanilla' emacs screen. Hurts my eyes just to look at it. I'm curious to see where this goes. I use Vim and like it, but *maybe* I could be persuaded to try emacs. Haven't done anything with it since dabbling for a university course on Unix, which was very basic "this is how you edit and save a file" stuff.

[@fab8652]

It's not like you are forced to use it tbf, changing it takes only one command. But I agree it does look pretty dated out-of-the-box nowadays. Fortunately, there are projects out there that aim to give a better ootb experience for those that want to try "vanilla"-ish Emacs, like emacs.kickstart and minimal-emacs.d

[@JohnBortins]

Doom EMACS with VIM motions -- yes

[@stefmyt5062]

I used Emacs for years. Dear god, I would not wish the default Emacs experience upon anyone. The very existence of default Emacs in 2025 is an affront to all things holy.

[@93nada]

I actually prefer emacs defaults over vim-style modal editing. I prefer using modifier keys and combinations, it always felt more natural to me. And when you use emacs default movement C-n/p/f/b with other defaults, it starts to makes sense why the keybindings are located the way they are. I feel like if you come from different editor and are trying to configure everything in emacs to work like in that editor, then the experience might not be that great and it would feel pointlessly complicated.

[@elihusolano5993]

I really like the idea of emacs. But I have to accept that I have a problem. I sometimes am too much a perfectionist, and I tweak the config. Whenever I want to use emacs I sometimes spend configuring the files until 2-4 AM, mind you I normally go to bed at 8 PM. Emacs might be the end of me...

[@zakkypatronu]

Hello! i think a video about and with doom emacs will be cool

[@johnschneider931]

All hail (hell?) the ribbon bar. 🍻

[@theshowmanuk]

No pain No gain

[@afroceltduck]

I gave emacs a good try last year, and liked it for what it is. Even got into configuring it and installing plugins and such. But, when I went back to my main PC, I couldn't get it to do one simple thing that I absolutely need. So I went back to neovim. Also, I hate that it makes you separate sentences with two spaces if you want to jump between sentences properly.

[@torspedia]

Maybe you can DistroTube could do a collab, on this challenge, as he uses Doom Emacs.

[@JohnSmith-lc1ml]

This is hype. I want to see if emacs is worth learning

[@essetee]

Emacs comes from the terminal era. The same as for mutt. Functional but not build for good looks.

[@doomknight233]

I can't see how people like Vim's modes or key bindings. I want to have a terminal editor but none have the Emacs key bindings of Ctrl-n, Ctrl-p, etc... I see KZbinrs who use Emacs as a Vim-like and I can't understand it lol

[@hamm8934]

Its because Vim bindings are ubiquitous. You learn them once, and they translate everywhere. From basic unix utils like git to even modern GUI apps like Todoist, they all support Vim motions. I’ve never tried emacs bindings, but I learned vim motions back in like 2012 and have used them everywhere sense.

[@edheil]

Vanilla Emacs does everything an editor does... edits text files. It should be fine.

[@open-source-fiddler]

I'll do a "react" video today or tomorrow, where I'll try to give you a few hints and recommendations. But I'm happy that you want to at least give it a try.

[@defaultgenCQ]

Keep track of how often you’re using Emacs just to configure Emacs. I love Emacs but it is an endless hobby car of a program, even compared to Vim or Linux. There is always something to add, tweak, fix, or yak shave.

[@Skelterbane69]

Can you play doom in doom emacs?

[@zherka_pill]

Try learing raw eamcs bindings

[@keyboard_g]

In a time when everyone is talking about Zed, we’re going back to Emacs.

[@louisgaarphotography4249]

Emacs Noooo. PS nice haircut :)

[@sterben4958]

Doom emacs is great

[@stevechan5315]

No, you must start with vallina Emacs. Just begin with the info, and C-h f, C-h v, C-h everything.

[@Sub0x-x40]

Just use doom emacs lol. I would start in doom emacs, use it for 6 months and then go back and dabble in vanilla. Would just be too painful and too much friction to do it your way. I would be open to it! I like emacs (well i like it wiothout ever having used it)

[@newplayer7743]

Emacs?! What kind of operating system is that? 🤔

[@vmisev]

Why bother with configuring emacs or vim when we have a tool that does job perfectly well and needs zero configuration? BTW, ed(1) is the standard text editor 😉

[@TrustJesusToday]

Anyone obsessed with Linux and owns a Honeywell fan has got to be OK.

[@topherfungus8424]

Ive made it over 25 years without opening emacs, maybe you'll convince me

[@stulora3172]

1:50 long term emacs user here (>20 years). No one wants vanilla emacs. don't do that to yourself. Just.... Don't.

[@clasclin]

It's not true that you NEED to configure everything all the time, you can allow yourself to just use default or config only what you're gonna use, for example in nvim config I have number lines and shiftwidth, that's it. I use it for a little bit of bash, perl, python, and notes. Otherwise you endup in a rabbit hole hell of config and never use it for anything

[@reinettetinekerr219]

emacs 30?

[@hansdampf2284]

Don’t go vanilla if you’re going to recreate doom anyway. You gonna end up with some half working evil mode and you never gonna do it as good as doom does it. Because there were several people working on doom for years. There’s tons and tons of code they added to make it work as good as it does. And it’s not because you’re too dump to do it, it’s just that you don’t have the time. I’ve been using vanilla emacs for more than a decade and I switched to doom instead throwing my old config away. Their curation is just better than anything I could ever do. And you still get do a lot of configuration if you want to. My config.el for doom is over a thousand lines. I wish you the best luck and enjoyment. If you’re going doom there are some very good tutorials from zaiste programming here on KZbin

[@DarthVader11912]

I finally won 😂😂

[@Lea_D.]

My reaction to this video is: - It sounds like you really, really don't want to try/use emacs again, so I feel like saying don't do it then. Since you're already expecting a negative experience, it's more likely to be a negative experience. I'd say wait until you're able to go into it with an open mind, if that ever happens. - That said, I also tried and quit emacs a couple of times before I finally just went ahead and kept using it until I had gotten used to how it worked, then I was happy. There was one and only one reason I committed to it: org-mode. There were no decent outliners that I could find (for Linux anyway). But I needed something where I could very quickly do *all* the outline stuff without having to use the mouse. Maybe there are more option these days, I don't know--I still haven't seen anything better or more useable than org-mode. There's also a markdown mode, of course. - IMO if you immediately put evil mode on it, then you're not using vanilla emacs. You've already totally changed the vanilla experience. Of course I understand why people do this, but it's not vanilla. - You can turn on one of the built-in modus themes right away to banish the ugly.

[@xanderxk]

vscode is better)

[@willemhbos]

I'm in the process of reverting back to Emacs as well (it's an addiction). I think that micro dosing is most important. If you just keep adding more packages to your configuration, you'll be overwhelmed in no time. If you want Emacs to be more user friendly, look at orderless, vertico, marginalia, which-key and consult. To me, they are the bare minimum to make Emacs usable. Apply cosmetics by adding ef-themes, fontaine and spacious-padding; these are well-maintained and documented packages. And all of the above require very little configuration but will immensely improve the experience.

[@morpheusdamon348]

Please go for org roam in doom emacs. And make a good tutorial about all that complicated shit. I have been wanting to go into that. But it just so convulated and overloaded , that even other tutorials can't help much.

[@Martin-lc1sk]

youre a closet emacs fan, why deny the truth ?

[@samarnagar9699]

Emacs need its neovim the vim got it

[@donaldwilliams6821]

Vanilla emacs is awful. haha Good luck with that.

[@BobbyM-p2z]

Nano is so much easier.

[@anthonybeyond]

THIS!^ LOL