[iLemming]

I'm a die-hard vimmer. I use vim motions in my editors, my IDEs, my browsers, my WMs, my terminals. I use vim-like navigation system-wide - e.g. for the volume control I switch to "media" mode and press "j/k".

Neovim is great, I use it almost every day. But it just can't replace Emacs. That is the most annoying part of Emacs - there's simply no alternative to it. If you accept it with all its quirks and weirdness and embrace the malleability, stick with it for a while - at some point you may discover some enormous feeling of empowered liberation from years of bullcrap you had to deal with without even realizing.

Here's a comment I posted on /r/emacs couple of weeks ago:

So yes, Neovim is snappier, and so what? I'm genuinely curious, I consider myself a die-hard, hardcore vimmer. Yes, I use Emacs today, but I'm still a vimmer. I sometimes use Neovim too - having vim skills comes handy with pure terminal workflows.

So, honest question - why should it appeal to me - the idea of ditching Emacs and moving to Neovim (or whatever) full-time?

- I have a few thousand notes in my Org-Roam note taking system. My notes can contain anki-cards - my spaced-repetition content is just my notes; my pdf annotations - they are just my notes; my health records - are just my notes; I don't need to use Postman - my API investigations - are just my notes.

- I don't need to use Ansible, Chef or Nix to maintain my dotfiles - they are tangled from an .org file - I just need Emacs to bootstrap the whole system.

- I read Reddit and Hackernews in Emacs.

- I manage my email in Emacs.

- My Telegram is in Emacs.

- I search Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, DuckDuckGo, and more without leaving Emacs.

- I write everything in Emacs (even this very comment), because I have thesaurus, spellchecking, definition and etymology lookup, translation, dictionaries, LLM integration - I can ask AI at the point of typing text (in just about any buffer).

- My AI coding assistant is in Emacs.

- My PR reviews happen in Emacs. Everything git related happens in Emacs. I go through my GitHub notifications in Emacs.

- I watch videos with Emacs - it allows me to control them directly - I can speed up, mute, pause the video, extract transcript - all while taking some notes.

- I do my Jira in Emacs.

- I open and search through Slack threads in Emacs.

- I learn programming languages through exercism.io in Emacs.

- My file manager is in Emacs - I have tried so many different ones - mc, yazi, ranger - nothing beats Dired in customizability and capabilities.

- I access my browser history and even browse and switch tabs of my browser - in Emacs.

- I even OCR text out of screenshots with Emacs.

So now tell me, why should I care that there is something, anything, whatever - snappier, prettier, shinier, more popular? Why should I ever feel FOMO, if it can never do even the small subset of what my current system is capable of doing today?

[i_think_so]

Whoa. iLemming, I dub thee eLemming -- for Elite. Even among the everything-in-emacs crowd, that is some impressive next level stuff right there.

In the past I've investigated emacs enough to appreciate that asking someone for their emacs config is a mix of Futile + Way Too Personal + Too Much Work (on their part, explaining etc). But do you perhaps have a blog or something somewhere about your setup, so noobs who aspire to that kind of emacsdom could get an idea of what is possible and how you're doing it?

[iLemming]

Wow, thank you of course, but honestly, you're giving me way too much credit. None of this stuff I mentioned requires some special skills - most of it is about finding the right package and installing it. My Emacs config is here¹ - there's nothing to hide there, it's all pretty much public knowledge.

- Org-Roam is a widely known and popular package. However, I moved to Vulpea, because it has much faster and improved indexing. Over the years I have accumulated few thousand notes and vanilla Org-Roam indexing became a bottleneck.

- For spaced repetition I use anki-editor and some yasnippet templates to quickly create cards. There exist multiple packages for Anki and other kind of cards.

- Tangling dotfiles (or any files) from Org is a known trick. Many manage their Emacs configs that way

- API investigations are a bunch of Org-mode source blocks. I use ob-http and verb.el

- For Reddit and Hackernews, I use hnreader and reddigg with some customizations on top

- For email I use notmuch. Some prefer mu4e

- For Telegram - telega.el

- For universal search - consult-omni

- For writing - mw-thesaurus, jinx, define-it, wiktionary-bro, google-translate, sdcv

- For LLMs - gptel-agent and ECA

- For PRs - code-review.el

- For watching videos a custom transient atop mpv.el

- For browser history - browser-hist.el

- Last two pieces are of my own doodling, you can find them in my config - I keep procrastinating, I need to make them into separate packages.

No, I do not have a blog - I'm a peculiar writer. Like Russians say: writing is like pissing - you should do it only when you can't hold it anymore². I guess I'm not there yet. I do occasionally publish some YouTube vids, I have a channel with a pretentious name³.

Feel free to ping me with any questions, it will be a real pleasure to be of help . I'm sure you can find a way to contact me directly - I'm pretty easy to find.

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¹ https://github.com/agzam/.doom.d

² "to write" and "to piss" in Russian is the same word - писать. The difference only in pronouncing.

³ https://www.youtube.com/@emacspropaganda