Life is 90% of my use cases for org-mode
I once wrote a long comment on Hacker News about how I wasted 2 years on trying to learn emacs. I wish I could go back and stop anyone from ever reading it in case I put someone off from trying it.<p>I was in a weird place at the time and scapegoated emacs for my lack of productivity. Don&#x27;t get me wrong it is possible to spend a lot of time fiddling with your config files for emacs.<p>I picked emacs up again after I quit my last job (quitting made me almost immediately a happier person). I decided to only use packages that would help me to write code, and EVIL mode. So lsp-mode (and the associated lsp-servers), flycheck for syntax highlighting, DAP for debugging &amp; breakpointing code, magit for git and Projectile for project management.<p>I read the documentation thoroughly for each plugin to actually see what it was doing, and many times jumped directly into the source code of the plugin to see how it was moving under the hood. I started using org-mode to document my journey into each plugin and grew really fond of the ability to collapse points under headers and freely move the headers about in the file with a few keystrokes.<p>I loved that I could create my own IDE using emacs-lisp. I have a completely minimal interface with just the mode-line and the pane of text. No gaudy menus, no enormous always present side panel, no top bar. Just me and the text. When I start the program it loads an empty window. There are no distractions in emacs, and no incentive to ever add them. And if Stallman ever decided to sell out, I have a fork of the code at its current version which I could use forever.<p>I jump between backend and front end code in emacs and due to the hooks and mode setup, it always knows the right things to turn on to make it easier to work on that specific chunk of text.<p>Emacs is an alien technology. It has so much power I didn&#x27;t know what to do with it at the start and that scared me. I dedicated a bit of my life to it, and now I am confident knowing that if I pick up a new language in the future I will be writing it in emacs.