The Emacs Platform

A month ago I wrote down my goals to achieve a deep understanding of my entire work platform, from editor to architecture; something I never did before, since I always only learned enough to get through each day.

It’s nice to have goals. How shall I meet them? Especially since my primary goal is still to get through each day. My boss does like it a lot when I meet my commitments.

So far I’m taking a depth-first approach where I take a deep dive into each plank of my platform. I can’t take this to extremes of course; everything on my to-do list is very extensive and will reward years of research; so someday I’ll have to choose another plank and dive into it.

But so far I’m having a great time with Emacs.

I can take notes (org mode).

I can maintain a blog site, like this one (org mode plus org-static-blog).

I can track my work (org mode time tracking features).

I can manage my money (ledger mode).

I get a high-quality Git interface (magit).

I can write presentations (org mode plus org-reveal).

Not that everything’s perfect. I tried the Emacs shell but gave it up and returned to konsole. Konsole is just a better fit for my needs. And I tried a couple of email clients (Gnus and mu4e). Actually I really liked both of these… but my colleagues didn’t care for it. Emacs mail clients are not able to quote the original HTML message, when replying to HTML messages; they remove all the HTML formatting. Since all Outlook users (which is all of my email correspondents) use HTML messages by default, I wasn’t really playing well with others. Even so, I did end up with a much improved mail system; more about that later.

I’ve gotten the best, most interesting Emacs advice from Mike Zamansky’s Using Emacs Series. I recommend it highly.