emacs

Evil mode makes Emacs more Vim than Vim.

Today we continue my ongoing series on Emacs with a feature of Emacs that feels genuinely magical: Dired. One of the first things I did when I became a Linux user was to learn how to use the terminal. The terminal is an indispensable tool in the Unix world broadly because of its versatility. I got to a point where I used the terminal so heavily that eventually on Linux I stopped installing file explorers, and on macOS I had entire directories that never had those annoying .

This is part of an ongoing series where I talk about the little things that make Emacs a nice editor. Today’s entry: Magit, a Git interface for Emacs. I’m not much of a Git client person myself. I don’t use or particularly like Sourcetree or GitKraken. VS Code and JetBrains IDEs have some nice features, especially when it comes to merging and rebasing, but they’re still not quite like Magit.

This is the first installment of an indefinite series calling (in lieu of a better name) “Cool Emacs Things,” little things about Emacs that makes it a very handy editor. Today’s entry: Editing files over SSH. This was something I discovered recently by accident. I run a private email server and the IMAP portion of the server is handled by Dovecot. Dovecot is great but by default the configuration is spread across dozens of files, and, while trying to tediously edit multiple files over SSH in Vim, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could do this with Emacs?

Recently I learned that Emacs supports linking with dynamic modules, so I tried writing one in Rust.

Previously I had written about trying Emacs, but looking back on that post I felt like I was bit vague about the ways in which it’s changed the things I do, so I wanted to provide some examples. Emacs has replaced a number of programs in my life, and not all of them are developer related.

No, really, you should try Emacs.