IRC and Emacs all the things
&gt; Not having a general text editor at your disposal for when you have to input&#x2F;manage loads of text is like being a carpenter and only having a hammer in the toolbox.<p>Once I learned Emacs to the sufficient level, I felt that. Today, I can&#x27;t even imagine typing any text in anything else but Emacs. Having all the tools you need at your disposal - spellchecking, thesaurus, dictionary, word lookup, translation, etc., feels extremely empowering.<p>My work machine is a Mac. I have written this¹, mainly to integrate with Emacs. Whenever I need to type anything longer than four words, in any program, I use that. The idea is simple - to copy existing text, call emacsclient, it invokes a function that opens a buffer and pastes the text into it. Then you edit the text in Emacs, press dedicated key-sequence - it grabs the text, switches back to the program, pastes the text back in there. It works surprisingly well. I can for example, open Browser Dev Tools; invoke Emacs; switch to js-mode, have all the bells and whistles: syntax-highlighting, autocomplete, etc.; write some javascript; finish editing and it would paste the code back into the Dev Tools console.<p>Sometimes I use Linux with EXWM. When I first discovered it, I got very excited. Not because now I could manage all windows through Emacs, but mostly because EXWM can &quot;translate&quot; and &quot;simulate&quot; the keys. So, for example, you can use same key-sequences that you use on Mac, but they&#x27;d translate into Linux native keys. There&#x27;s no &quot;context switching&quot;, you don&#x27;t need to re-adapt to the keys all the time. It took me a few hours to learn EXWM and configure it, next day I wrote exwm-edit² Emacs package.<p>Being able to write any kind of text in your favorite editor is truly liberating. I highly recommend trying. Be warned though - it&#x27;s impossible to live without that later. The only reason I don&#x27;t much use Windows these days - because I haven&#x27;t yet figured out the way of doing this in Windows. Someday I will.<p>---<p>¹ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;agzam&#x2F;spacehammer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;agzam&#x2F;spacehammer</a><p>² <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;agzam&#x2F;exwm-edit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;agzam&#x2F;exwm-edit</a>