And with my handheld portable all-purpose lightweight doohickey I fuse thoughts and try not to be too picky. —Buck65

I’m personally offended that you enjoy the software you work with ;)—al3x

Update: Full 60-minute screencast now available at PeepCode!

A few weeks ago I decided to try out Emacs. I wasn’t especially dissatisfied with TextMate but felt that I had neglected to educate myself about a major part of computer science history. Somewhat like a DJ who has never heard Grandmaster Flash (who purportedly invented much of the hardware used to create music with multiple turntables). I felt that I needed to try out one of the classic text editors still used by many today.

My history with text editors over the last 10 years goes something like:

• BBEdit
• vim (for about 6 months)
• Smultron
• TextMate

Screencast

I’ve assembled a short screencast of my initial impressions:

Initial Impressions

The Good Stuff

Here’s a short list of what I’m enjoying about it so far:

• Efficiently keyboard driven. No need to use the mouse at all.
• Window splits for viewing multiple files (and shells) at once.
• Powerful editing.
• The ease with which one can work with dozens of files without getting confused.
• Super customizable.
• Easy to keep settings, snippets, plugins, etc. synchronized between desktop and laptop with Git.
• Quality plugins from the community.
• The aha moment when parts of code make more sense given the fact that Emacs was used by Matz, Ryan Davis, Nathan Weizenbaum, etc. to author them.
• That unidentifiable elitist feeling you get from using a tool that’s too difficult or awkward for most people.

The Awkward Bits

• No GUI for preferences.
• Mac OS X integration is just barely good enough to get by. For example, I can’t get “Hide Others” to work except by using the mouse.
• It’s assumed that you’ll do most work from within Emacs itself rather than piping text to it.
• Crashes when trying to switch color themes. This may be a problem with the color theme plugin I’m using.
• It’s difficult to think about content and files instead of icons and buttons.

Getting Started

Installing, learning, and configuring Emacs is unfortunately not easy. I’m working on a PeepCode screencast with Phil Hagelberg that I hope to finish within the next few weeks. In the meantime, here are some resources I used to get started on Mac OS X:

• Install from Git mirror of the source
• See the nextstep/INSTALL file for Mac installation instructions.
• Phil Hagelberg’s starter kit—Tremendously useful.
• My current config—Use at your own risk. Yes, I use a huge font size.

Useful Plugins

• yasnippet.el—TextMate-style tab trigger snippets with mirroring, defaults, etc.
• textmate.el—Provides tremendously useful keyboard shortcuts for TextMate switchers. I’ve modified it to work with my setup.
• magit—Git integration.

See Also

• Full 60-minute screencast now available at PeepCode!
• Alex Payne on the flight to old text editors
• Phil Hagelberg on learning emacs—Plus links to other blog articles about recent adopters

And a word from our sponsor

New hot-selling PeepCode Screencast authored by Lars Pind.