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Thinking of getting into emacs, any advice?
Recently I’ve been growing dissatisfied with my current workflow (Obsidian and iA) and looking to try something new, and someone recommended emacs, as long as I was up for the challenge. I figure it can’t hurt to try, and if I don’t implement it, well, I’ll have learned something.
I’m fairly comfortable with CLIs, but will likely use a GUI, and will be using on a Mac.
Anyone have advice for a total novice?
This is utterly brilliant, thank you so much! I’m bookmarking this and will refer back as I learn. Thank you for taking the time to compile all this information, I’m determined at this point to at least try.
I have more than a passing familiarity with UNIX systems, even though it’s always been with Macs. I’m very excited to see how much of what I’m familiar with translates over, and how much new there is to learn! :)
First off, awesome comment.
I tend to agree, and wanted to add
pandoc -o novel.pdf novel.mdas a recommendation. With pandoc installed and any editor for the Markdown (personally I like Helix), you're pretty much bound to get good to great results with minimal effort.I suggest you don't get into emacs.
Get into vim instead!
something something holy war something
I’m beginning to think I've unintentionally wandered into some sort of battleground…
Both EMACS and Vi(m) are a bit archaic - left over from the days when GUI desktops didn't exist. Many people learn one or the other in school for an I.T. major. Keystrokes become reflexes and nostalgia. So, yes, it is a bit of holy war. :-)
I wouldn't.
I say that as someone who was very into EMACS in college. I was even a member of alt.religion.emacs.
A lifetime later my move(s) the IDE of the shop(s) where I worked helped me interoperate with coworkers and project software a lot.
If I went back in time to do college again I would probably learn VI. Same reason, many more people use it and it wold make it easier to interoperate with them.
You will get more back on your investment by learning a modern tool or technology -- for the most part. SED and AWK will make you into a wizard. :-)
If you must learn a new editor, I would try Code. It has a few annoyances AFAIK, but it is elegant in many ways.
I’m not concerned with interoperability, as this is only for my personal writing workflow, not that for my 9-5. But this is good to know, thanks!
If you mean writing as in essays, articles, stories, etc there are far better pieces of software. Even if you want to be on the CLI and do not care about formatting ( bold, italics, line spacing, etc ).
Any suggestions for what would work then? I’m accustomed to using markdown for formatting.
Not OP but I’ve been using Typora for writing in Markdown. It’s a visual markdown editor but I have like its workflow and features more that writing Markdown in VS Code.
Any CLI text editor will work if you have the markdown memorized and type it manually. Nano is extremely simple and is likely already on your *nix machine. Lesser know, but also simple & CLI is NE. It has DOS style drop down menus.
If you want the editor to do things for you in regards to markdown, then I would look at what extensions exist for markdown for either EMACS or Vim (vi clone ). Pick either editor by how much you think you might like the extension.
If you are really into learning something funky you can put a DOS emulator on your machine and look for a copy of early Word Perfect which ran in the DOS shell.
Thanks, this is very helpful! I’ve been eyeing Doom, and honestly that it refers to itself as “opinionated” is what sent me here to ask if those wiser than me can offer suggestions. (I happen to like “opinionated.”)
It’s very big, is I suppose my hesitation. But knowing that there are others who use it in a smaller sense is helpful.
What are you planning to use it for? Just note taking? If you want a customizable note taking environment, I suggest you try Neovim with Neorg. Or you can even use your existing obsidian vault with obsidian.nvim.
I think Emacs is only worth it if you want something that is extremely custom and integrated with everything else that you do. It's pretty hard to make different things work well together, that's why things like Doom Emacs exist. Neovim would be slightly less configurable, but it's more than enough for most people, and if you just want a note taking app that you can better adapt for your specific workflow, nvim will work well for you.
Neorg is even working on a mobile app and other cool stuff like built-in GTD mode, which would make it even better to use than Emacs Orgmode (although it's already better syntax-wise, since Neorg was specifically designed to avoid some design mistakes that org made)
I write novels! I used to use an app called Ulysses, which was basically the same as Obsidian is now. iA has been feeling too restrictive to my needs (sit down, write) and Obsidian is my default for taking notes.
I’ll check out Neorg, thanks!
Everyone else here is saying try Vim and I'd echo it.
I learned Vim years ago in university and still find it useful when I need to work on Linux shells at work to make my life much easier.
I have a vimrc I made like 10 years ago and stick with it now, it's great!
I think I have a very similar use-case for emacs as you. I started using Emacs to organize my lab notebook in plaintext and continue to use org-mode for writing and notetaking.
I would recommend using doom emacs to get you up and running with a basic configuration. You can configure doom using the init.el file. I would reccomend turning on org, zen, spell, and grammar to begin with. I also use the package denote and a few others to organize my notes.
I installed emacs using homebrew and emacs-plus, which works great on my m1 mac book air.