This is quite an interesting experience.

I will not say that I am wholly disappointed, but that it is sad. I've been a vi user for the better part of my teens, and I've only picked up Emacs around ten years ago, when I was 19. So this challenge was less of a dive into foreign waters, and more of a return to my own roots. And it is interesting to see your grandparents do some renovations, to see signs of prosperity in some areas, but to also notice that they are struggling. Not financially, but in that they've lost track of what made them who they are.

This is a blog post dedicated to my, and many other people's favourite text editor. In-keeping with the theme of this section, I shall mainly focus on the misunderstood nature of the editor, and my personal connection to it. Most of it is going to be in the negative light, so it slightly edges out being posted in the Software section.

This is a blog post dedicated to the configuration language of my favourite editor: Emacs.

It is true that Emacs owes its flexibility and very configurable nature to this wonderful and awful language. It is both its greatest strength and weakness. It is simply the brick wall that is responsible for the learning curve.

Magit is an excellent package with incredible depth.

Sadly it is accompanied by the most unreadable documentation which is saying something, given that it's an Emacs package.

Here I will detail an example configuration to set up a GitHub to magit interface.

GitHub

This is the default, and probably most relevant.

This is a semi-rant, but I believe a worthwhile use of my time. There are two compliant implementations of the language server protocol, which do not have a bipartisan objective review attached to them.

Some would argue that eglot is superior by virtue of being in the Emacs core, some would instead argue that lsp-mode is more feature complete and far more lenient towards language servers with non-standard extensions. Those are true, but they only affect the first-hand experience, something that only a total script kiddie will complain about.

In Emacs, it is often easiest to install a package in one's initialising configuration file; also known as init.el, usually located at ~/config/emacs/init.el, but also historically at ~/.emacs.d/init.el as under a different name .emacs.

This file is responsible for reading your persistent configuration and is often written to by your resident Emacs binary, on first launch and after you've made some customisations. It is configured in Lisp, which is both a data representation format (Symbolic expressions), and a programming language.

This is a topic that came up because of three things. The two Emacs blogs that came up on the Planet Emacs RSS feed talked about retaining a minimal configuration and keeping it minimal, providing good advice. I don't wish to dismantle those blog entries, but merely point out that minimalism can be useful for things other than aesthetic minimalism.

In this post I will try to summarise my experience with all things LSP (language server protocol). I will talk primarily about the two most important implementations of LSP for Emacs: eglot that is built into Emacs, and lsp-mode that seems to be much more feature complete.

I'm a major user of Emacs. But I'm not, for lack of a better term, an Emacs zealot. If you ask me what editor should you use, the answer isn't automatically, or often, Emacs. The zealots believe that it is enough to cite the power, and the relatively low skill floor for Emacs to be an optimal choice, but I would say that I disagree vehemently. I've even written about it (hint: look in the rants section).