I have a long history of dabbling with emacs, having discovered it during my latter undergrad years (the emacs 18 era). I’d pick it up for a while, and then go back to whatever editor I happened to be using at the time. I liked emacs, but using it wasn’t anything that ever really stuck with me. Part of the reason was that I didn’t really have a solid use case for something like emacs. Emacs also has a not-so insignificant learning curve and getting into it can be pretty overwhelming and intimidating.
When I started on the PhD, I made a concerted effort to make emacs one of my primary tools, having learned about things like org-mode and distributions like spacemacs and doom-emacs from other people.
Org-mode makes setting up something like a research notebook pretty easy, and getting started is pretty simple. The basics are pretty easy to learn and when you want to do something more advanced, the documentation is very good.
Now, after spending the past couple of years of using emacs routinely, I’ve decided it’s time to learn more and start crafting my own emacs configuration. I’ll get to learn a little more elisp and dive into some of the packages I’ve become used to using. Might be something I keep and continue to evolve, or I might go back to spacemacs. Maybe I’ll try something else later.
It feels kind of like when a Jedi reaches the point in their training when they make their own light saber.