At the mundane little sysadmin blog I contribute to, I wrote a little piece explaining why you need to know vi keybindings. I’m sure you emacsheads will love it.
So a sysadmin friend and I decided that there just weren’t enough blogs about systems administration and linux out there. So we started another one: ihopesolution.com I’m sure it will develop its own voice, since we both have, um, firmly held opinions about how things should be done. And odd senses of humor. Since I tend to use emacs more for writing and org-mode rather than sysadminning, I’ll keep my emacs posts for my personal blog.
I have a modest goal: write some fiction. Instead of actually working toward accomplishing that goal, I’m going to obsess about the toolchain and other externalities used to support this endeavor. I will use revision control. By an accident of history I will be using git. I will use a text editor. Since I don’t want to have to run into frictions from modal editing while fiction writing, I will be using Emacs.
When I started using Emacs, I had grandiose notions of producing copious amounts of prose, linking it together in all sorts of interesting and helpful ways, and basically revolutionizing the way I experienced computers. But most of all, I had a new and urgent desire to do everything from the keyboard in a blazingly efficient manner. I proceeded to burn the Emacs keybindings into my brain and fingers. I developed some slightly inefficient workflows (copying and pasting from text documents into OpenOffice documents, editing the original text file based on whatever page length I was going for, rinse and repeat until paper is produced) that were, on the whole, a net gain due to the speed of typing without mousing.
This is the story of a man and his favorite text editor. In 2001, I was a freshman in college, which meant the closest thing to highspeed internet that I had hitherto experienced. Which upped my time surfing the web. One of the delightful sites I lighted upon was Ftrain. One day, I dug through Ftrain’s archives and found Emacs Notepad. I was intrigued. Having exclusively used Word (and Notepad to edit HTML - ha!