Emacs Is the Ultimate Editor Building Material

Emacs is not a great text editor in and of itself—it’s a building material for the best text editor you can make for yourself.

I find this to be absolutely true as I stare at my 1700 line init.el that customizes Emacs to my needs. There is a way to do pretty much anything you could want with enough fiddling.

Read Why Emacs: Redux by Bozhidar Batsov.

Links to this note

• Tools for Thought Are Necessarily Monolithic

  I read Unbundling Tools for Thought and I find myself agreeing and disagreeing. They are correct that people over invest in tools for networked thought and can get stuck in an unproductive cycle of rebuilding the system over and over again. They are incorrect that the solution is to unbundle into multiple tools and interop between them—point solutions are good at what they do but don’t provide as much building material needed to make it a home.

• Defadvice Is Text Editor Superglue

  The Emacs advice system lets you modify the code running Emacs in a simple way. For example, if you wanted to change one line in a package you use to do something different or fix a bug before the maintainers release a new version, you can “advise” code to do what you want.