Emacs Carnival: Starter Kits

I've had two starts with Emacs that I can remember: once sometime in the early 00s, and then again sometime around 2017.

I first tried Emacs in the early 2000s. The details of exactly when and why are mostly lost in the mists of time/bad memory, but it was probably not too long after moving to Linux, and probably as a result of exploring free software for coding.

My memory tells me that I struggled to get into Emacs that first time. And also that my laptop at the time struggled to run it.

So, for one reason or another, I started to use vi/vim instead. Which is also not particularly easy to learn, so perhaps it was just the resource issue that made me stick with it over Emacs. Regardless, stick with it I did, and with time I became fully embedded in the world of vi bindings.

Then I got a job that required me work in Windows and Visual Studio. Coming from Linux and vi, this was both painful and interesting - it forced me to get familiar with using an IDE, and I remember the joy of having an easy to use debugger. (I'm sure I must have used an IDE before that - I definitely dabbled with Eclipse - but I don't have a memory of ever getting particularly familiar with one.)

Anyway, a happy day for me was finding a plugin called VsVim that let me use 90% of the keybindings I was used to. It made me realise that vi bindings could be portable.

Sometime in the late 2010s I started using a web app called Workflowy. I can't remember why. But I liked it - it had a notion of infinitely nested bullets points as a way of organising various parts of your life.

After a while I moved on from Workflowy. I think I was put off by the proprietary nature of it and my data living in someone else's servers. I looked around for alternatives, and I think I then first came across orgzly. I guess I was looking for something mobile-based.

It was very similar in its ability to nest bullets, interlink between files, use it to organise your life etc. Looked good! (And I still love orgzly to this day).

Now, orgzly is backed by org-mode files. And org-mode is Emacs. But I was a vim user of many years. If I wanted to edit my org files on my laptop, how was I going to square that circle?

Based on my VsVim usage, I searched for the crazy idea of vi bindings in Emacs. And lo and behold, Spacemacs showed up in the results with its catchy tagline:

The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it’s Emacs and Vim!

I was never a fan of the editor wars nonsense, so I was immediately intrigued. And it turned out that vi bindings are a first-class citizen in Emacs thanks to the power of Evil. Spacemacs has an entire evil ecosystem wired up and ready to go out of the both.

I was back in the land of Emacs.

Speaking to my own journey here, Spacemacs was a huge contribution to me using Emacs. Almost entirely because of its absolutely stellar support for vi bindings out of the box. Without that, it's likely that I wouldn't have tried life with Emacs again.

Spacemacs has saved time with lots of other aspects of my Emacs life, too, so 10 or so years later I still use Spacemacs on my laptop¹. And now I also use Doom Emacs on my phone². They and their communities are enormously helpful. I've not felt any great need to 'go vanilla' and build my own config from scratch. Maybe one day, as a project in understanding Emacs, but for now I am more than content to stand on the shoulders of giants.

So, I am personally very in favour of starter kits. I wouldn't be using Emacs if not for one of them.