Things I Like About Emacs

If you don’t follow my personal blog, you may not know this, but I’ve been conned into trying Emacs again. Okay, maybe conned is the wrong word. More like suckered into a bet. Goaded into it.

One of my friends on the Discord was talking shit about openSUSE. That somehow ended up with him using openSUSE and me using Emacs. The first person to give up loses the bet.

I’ve now been using vanilla Emacs for over a week, and I have a few things I actually like. I have said so many negative things about Emacs over the years; I figure it would be good to say some nice things. After all, there will definitely be more negative things to say.

Cross-Client Buffers

In Vim, the buffers are all contained within that session. If you open up another instance of Vim, you don’t really have access to those buffers. You can jerry-rig it, but as far as I know, it’s a bit janky.

In Emacs, thanks to the Emacs daemon, you get access to all of your buffers in all windows. Or frames, as Emacs calls them.

I love this, as it means I can just move around and do whatever I need without worrying if I need to go find that other frame that I left open on workspace 13.

The Flexibility of Lisp

I don’t know much about Lisp. I’m learning quite a bit, but most of my config has come from a huge amount of Googling. But as I go, I’m picking up that there is a ton you can do with Lisp (e-Lisp, really). I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but it is more flexible than I thought it would be. And it has been easy to learn. I wouldn’t say it is as easy as, say Bash, but it’s still very nice.

I, and I hate to say this, kind of like it better than Lua. I had a much harder time with Lua than I have with eLisp.

Dired

I like Dired better than Vim’s built-in file manager. It feels more organic and less tacked on.

Markdown Support

Because Emacs is a GUI, I can have variable-sized fonts and multiple fonts. Terminals, and therefore Vim, can’t do that. This ability makes Emacs much nicer for Markdown writing, which is the vast majority of what I do.

Better Built-In Help

I dislike that everything in Emacs is a keychord. But they have built-in help for that problem. Discovering what you can do after M-x is easy, because Emacs brings up a completion minibuffer. You can do this in Vim, of course, but it’s not out of the box. This, sad to say, makes it easier to discover Emacs bindings.

Conclusion

I have many negative things to say. And I will , in another blog post. But it’s not all bad. As I said on my personal blog, I’ve had fun getting my config together. It has been a challenge, and I’ve seemed to enjoy those lately. I don’t think I’ll have a problem winning my bet. Especially since Darth Vader is still saying openSUSE is useless. I’m having way more fun than he is. 🤣