Each september is my “Emacs anniversary”. It feels like I’m a sort of addict when put this way, but: I’ve been using Emacs since september 2017.

Time to reflect on the journey. But before mentioning my first encounter with Emacs (which ultimately took over most of my “computing needs”), let me take a step back.

I don’t have much of a “technical” background, but have always had an interest in IT. Writing my masters’ thesis in Sociology with Word was a rather furstrating experience, so when during my PhD I started exploring different types of software for writing. It started with Scrivener (writing software for Mac), but I soon realised that I was more interested in writing plain text documents (which separates content from formatting). This lead me to Ulysses, a markdown editor that made it easy to manage multiple markdown files.¹ Writing in markdown was nice, so I moved to Atom² to write text files and export these with pandoc to PDF and html. Atom proved a nice, initial encounter with “customizability”, as it was pretty configurable thanks to third-party packages.

Around september 2017 I came across Spacemacs. Although I can’t remember how it crossed my path – must have read about it “somewhere on the internet” – it immediately interested me. Spacemacs, at the time a popular modular Emacs configuration, came with clear installation instructions and a tutorial. When I first launched it, the configuration wizard asked whether I preferred “Vim” or “Emacs” style keybindings. Having never heard of either, I accepted the default, which turned out to be Vim.

Anyone familiar with the two, will be easily convinced that it took me a while to get simultaneously familiar with both Vim motions and Emacs concepts (and some additional time to figure out what is exactly the distinction between the two).

The first weeks and months of using Emacs, while I was still only exploring its use, it took some effort to do things as basic as moving around, but thanks to the included tutorial and Spacemacs’ excellent discoverability, I persisted.³ Even a year or two later, after I moved from Spacemacs to my own Emacs configuration, I used “Evil” keybindings for a few years (before switching to “vanilla” keybindings, which I’m currently using).

While I wouldn’t recommend anyone to learn Emacs while also learning Vim movements and keybindings at the same time, doing so was very rewarding.

It even turns out I liked (and actually stil like) the idea of modal editing, especially for writing prose. After all, a big part of writing is editing. Swiftly moving the cursor and deleting, moving or replacing text all with a minimum of keystrokes – that’s just incredibly powerful.

I often miss the “feel” of modal editing, but I am now very comfortable with Emacs vanilla keybindings. And after all, holding C- or M- for a few keystrokes, that comes pretty close to modal editing.

Anyway, this is how I “got into” Emacs. Needless to mention that it’s boundless customizability is what has kept me here after all these years. And what will keep me here for many years to come.