Emacs Carnival: Mistakes and Misconceptions

The theme for the Emacs Carnival in March 2026 is: Mistakes and Misconceptions, hosted by Philip Kaluđerčić.

• What were assumptions I had when starting to use Emacs that held me back? For instance functionality you thought was missing, packages you assumed were necessary, etc.
• Were there practices that you remember that you later discovered were needlessly inefficient?
• Can you recall things that had previously annoyed you, that you over time not only started tolerating but actually understanding and appreciating?
• Do you recall any insights that lead to “viewquakes”?
• Do you have examples of mistakes you have observed other users make, and have (hopefully) helped them by pointing these out?

I'm not aware of any mistakes that I've made in Emacs. Wait, hear me out! It's not that I don't think I've made any - far from it - I've no doubt that they are myriad and varied. It's in fact that I think I'm just at the level of knowledge where I'm only just becoming aware of what I'm doing wrong. There's so much to learn and I'm sure there's a huge amount that I'm doing suboptimally.

So while I might not be able to report much on past mistakes, I can instead reflect on the areas where my gut is telling me that I might currently be making mistakes.

(Aside: I've certainly encountered lots of errors when using Emacs - but whether those are my mistakes or Emacs'…. OK OK, yes, they are probably PEBKAC errors…)

One meta-mistake I can already see: I have no mentor(s) supporting me in my use of Emacs. People who could quite readily point out some of the mistakes that I am making. That reflects back to something from a previous post: I need to be more involved in the community (Emacs Carnival: The people of Emacs).

Some possible mistakes on my radar:

• Overrelying on an Emacs distribution. I use both Spacemacs and Doom Emacs. I am standing on the shoulders of giants and I am sure have been spared many mistakes as a result. But, you very regularly see people posting about getting back to managing Emacs by themselves and understanding it much better as a result. I'm content right now, but I'm always intrigued to read these experiences from others.
• Misusing Literate configuration. I like it a lot, but I saw a post recently from someone discussing why they'd stopped doing it and returned to maintaining config files directly. Worth considering.
• Trying to use Emacs for the wrong things. Sometimes I use Emacs for making diagrams, like UML and mindmaps, with PlantUML. Sometimes it makes sense. But really, using text for diagrams is pushing things a bit… perhaps it's more appropriate to use a visual diagram editor.
• Publishing my org-roam digital garden with org-publish. (How I publish my org-roam digital garden to the web with org-publish). I mean, it works, and I like using the native tool, but it's not the slickest site in the world and verrryyyyy slow to do a full publish. I see lots of pretty looking sites published with ox-hugo and I wonder if I should join the club.

Actually… I've thought of a mistake I've made and moved on from now.

At work I usually have both my org agenda files and my org-roam based knowledge base open throughout the day, as they're basically how I do 90% of all my work. For a while, I used separate frames for them. Not so bad, but I hit issues where sometimes I'd edit a file from one project in the other frame, and then get told it has changed on disk, and then run the risk of losing some changes.

So I've switched to using one frame and making use of workspaces within them (or layouts as Spacemacs calls them) - Updating my approach to window management and Emacs. I could probably have achieved a similar solution by using emacs server/client model. But workspaces are working well for now.

So those are my past and likely current mistakes. I don't really see many of them as mistakes, not really - just ways of doing things that make sense at the time but one day might need to change.