website/blog/emacs-the-journey-to-an-operating-system.org

#+TITLE: Emacs, the Journey to an Operating System
#+DATE: <2020-09-27 Sun>

* The Age without Emacs
  It's the 12th of February, I'm playing Factorio on my laptop, when the bell rings and not long
  after my Biology teacher enters the classroom, I quickly save and exit out of Factorio. After the
  usual formalities I sit down and open my editor, so that I can take notes during the lesson. As
  you might have guessed, I didn't open Emacs, instead I opened VSCode, yes I know, not even
  VSCodium, but the prorietary spyware-filled version. I then open a new Markdown file and started
  typing away. This procedure repeated multiple times during the day, until school ended and I got
  home, I sat down in front of my desktop and opened CLion, because I wanted to do some coding in
  Rust. I had VSCode opened on my desktop too, as I needed access to my notes, when one of my
  classmates wanted them. I had two completely different editors opened almost all the time and
  even vim, when I logged into remote servers and got to editing some =Dockerfile=. \\
  \\
  That is roughly how my day went, before I switched full time to Emacs and learned of all the
  features the Emacs operating system has. I didn't even realize, how much I was missing out on
  and how painful my existence was. Let's go over the different pain points I now, in retrospect,
  realize existed.

** The Pain
   If you're an Emacs veteran, you surely have already noticed everything I'll point out in the
   next few paragraphs, but please do read on as I present my unique view on the issues.

*** Multiple Editors
    Let's start with the most obvious one, during "A day in the Life of Me", I would switch between
    3 different editors, being, in increasing order of time spent in each, VSCode, CLion and Vim.
    This brings with it many issues, including but not limited to: keybindings, plugins/addons,
    look&feel, features and even supported files/projects. The editors could be split into two
    categories, classic: "CLion, VSCode" and "Vim". If you've spend even a minute on a *nix system,
    you must know what Vim is and that, let's be honest, it has a weird, alien control scheme. This
    "Weirdness" is even supported by a multitude of memes, such as: