Emacs

Thus far, Emacs feels like advanced next level bash. I'm looking at all the integrated workflows and ootions. You can hook in RSS, Firefox, email, programming languages, Arduino, serial, SSH, and LLM's, all within Emacs. It isn't a text editor, it is everything.

I think Derek Taylor (Distro Tube on YT) put it best when talking about the way people compare text editors, 'it isn't a relevant comparison; like apples to oranges.' Emacs is not a text editor; Emacs can do text editing. If all you're doing is text editing, you might be better off with the simple tool. If you are connecting workflows, Emacs is like a glue that can patch everything into one tool. Like you can run Emacs as a server and access files on the remote system through Emacs. Emacs appears to be a language more than anything, but a language between something like Bash and Python in simplicity and flexible scope.

Today I will be continuing my quest to integrate two large language models in parallel within Emacs. I want to use Emacs to make an agent that includes one of my largest models I can run on my hardware and a code completion specific model.

Additionally, everyone that appears to actually use Emacs seems to lean heavily into the org-mode stuff. That is one of my biggest curiosities at the moment. Go look at Sasha Chua's website. Most of that is rendered from org-mode. Org-mode seems to be a super powerful way of organizing your life, taking notes, and presenting information in useful ways.

I wondered why I don't hear about people using Emacs like I hear about other tools albeit leet or corpo standard. I think it is because Emacs is extremely intimate. It seems to be so tailored to the individual that it can't be shared. AI has turned into something like that for me too. The ways I find it to be useful are simply too nuanced to be relatable. I think Emacs is like this too. The ways it becomes useful are so integrated into the periphery and layering of workflows that it is not feasible to extract some small detail to share with another person outside of Emacs users at a similar point along the learning curve.

Editing speed is generally not all that significant in my experience. Actual editing is a small fraction of most work IME as a coder and even more when administrating etc..

Exploring, researching, organizing, executing, debugging, monitoring etc is what most people spend most of their time doing. For actual editing all editors work pretty well.

Emacs is a text manipulation environment that includes some editors (including vim if you want) that can be very productive in the long run for all of your activities, not just editing, in a coherent integrated manner. Most things boil down to text after all. But takes significant time to ramp up with and get to rich fluidity. It's an environment that you program and mold to your needs over time.

I just reached 30 years with it of continuous improvement and related rewards. There is nothing similar out there.

I would recommend learning vim in that case. I'm not sure about the availability of vi(m)/emacs on the systems you remote into, but if I was a betting man I'd say vi is more available than vim is more available than emacs. But if you learn vim and are stuck with vi one time it's still better than nano (for me, but I'm sure you're quite good with nano). Another benefit that extends outside of your text editing experience is that vim motions are offered out of the box for a lot of linux utilities (less) with no setup, or can be trivially added (tmux), which gives you familiar keybinding almost everywhere as well as an improved ergonomic (and likely speed) advantage.