In college when I first began to learn programming I decided it was imperative to teach myself two things: touch typing, which I'm amazed I managed without for so long, and vim. I chose vim, my side in the editor wars, based on the allure of modal editing and a distaste for key chording.

A couple of years later Emacs I was made of a superpower that Emacs possessed, a key selling point that brought many into the temple of Emacs -- org mode.

I honestly don't remember what prompted it but I was sucked in by the obsession of an all-in-one environment, where I could program and take notes and see my email and track tasks. I spend days setting up and tweaking my configuration, try to get all of the packages working in unison, only to tear everything down and start from scratch. Doom Emacs? Spacemacs? Prelude? I tried it all but nothing quite satisfied me.

In the end I gave up only because Emacs on MacOS was struggling to render completions and navigate code as fast as VSCode had set my expectations. These were the days before native-comp. Annually, like clockwork, I'd get the itch to try again, spend a week or two getting back up to speed and experimenting, but ultimately abandon it. The setup just never felt totally workable.

I've been thinking recently about digital minimalism -- the idea that we should be very intentional about how we use our technology to reap the most value without letting it control us. I believe my desire to use Emacs as an all-in-one environment stems a bit from a desire to achieve digital minimalism. There's this fantasy that if I could run my life off of plaintext and a couple of tools that have lasted generations then I'll achieve some technological nirvana.

Of source I know that's not true. I could just as easily achieve digital minimalism with specialized tools. Really my obsession with tools has always been a distraction from the real goal. And this isn't something unique to my digital life. I find in my hobbies that I so often obsess over the tools before even learning the basics.

Well, time to go re-install Emacs! 👋

#100DaysToOffload #5