Learning Emacs, or: Teaching an old dog old tricks

I decided to learn Emacs late last year, and it took some doing. But Emacs in a terminal is now my go-to editor. Why on earth, you might ask.

I've been a professional developer for quite some time, and I've always used IDEs for my work, especially in Java -- Jbuilder, Netbeans, IntelliJ, and, more recently, Rubymine. There are many things to love about these tools: autocompletion, instant symbol navigation, and so forth. Start typing a method call, and the editor prompts you for the parameters by name. Command-click on a symbol and it takes you to the definition, no matter where in the project it may live. But with the power come some annoyances, too. Mysterious freezing, slow start-up time -- and the nagging feeling that maybe I'm outsourcing a bit too much of my knowledge and skill to the IDE.

As a Ruby developer these last few years, I've found myself more and more on the command line. Pry, in particular, made me want to leave Rubymine behind. It's a much more intuitive debugging paradigm, and as far as I can tell, it is completely incompatible with a Rubymine run/debug config. (A 'binding.pry' encountered in the code will just hang the server started in Rubymine.) I wanted to stay in the terminal, where things are always fast and efficient.

It was time to learn Emacs or vi. I decided on Emacs mainly because vi's editing vs. navigation modes have always kind of bothered me.

Some reasons to learn Emacs, in no particular order:

1. Adios, trackpad and right-click menu navigation. Your hands stay on the keyboard
2. Learn the Emacs key bindings and you can use them all over MacOS 
3. Gain a new fundamental skill while doing exactly the same old thing at the job
4. Get IDE-level productivity on a remote system via SSH
5. Earn maximum old-timer street cred!

Out of the box, Emacs has some pretty cool stuff to offer. There's plenty to learn if you start with a vanilla install. To name just a couple of things I really like:

1. Buffers and windows just seem to work better than the typical paradigm (tabs) for dealing with files in a modern editor. C-x b enter always takes you to the previous file, whereas in Rubymine, Sublime, etc, I'm always searching for that other tab I was just using. C-x 3 to split into vertical windows, C-x 1 to get your current frame back to one window. These come in handy -- two files is about all I ever want to see at one time.
2. Dired for browsing/manipulating files. It's more powerful for file management than the project trees in the modern editors.

Add these packages, and you'll be flying.

1. Helm and projectile for navigating the project
2. Magit for git

Learning Emacs is like learning piano (if piano only took a couple of months to learn). It takes time, but you form muscle memory for executing an intention (going to a file, committing changes, etc), which ultimately feels more fluid than poking around in menus and panels with the mouse. Your visual cortex can stay focused on the high-level problem, and your spinal cord takes care of the details.