Hello again, Emacs

In 2004, during my first year of university, I started using Vim. It was a friend of mine who'd been using it, so I started using it too, because he seemed cool, and I wanted to be cool, at least as far as programmers could be cool back in 2004. I installed gvim on my family's computer, during the glorious days of Windows XP SP2. At some point, later on at university, I got into functional programming with Haskell, and then during my final year of university, in 2008, I started learning Common Lisp. I don't remember why, but I did. The Lisp community were pretty fond of SLIME, so I thought I also had to use it, which meant that I had to use Emacs. At this point I owned my first computer - a giant 17-inch Macbook Pro from 2007 - so I installed Aquamacs, and enjoyed some Lisp-y, Emacs-y goodness for a while.

In 2009 after I got my first job as a Perl developer, I kept using Emacs as my primary editor, but at some point I swapped back to Vim. Something about it just being easier when editing files after SSH'ing into dev and production machines, which was a thing we still did back then.

Fast-forward to May 2026, and after getting hit with a whole lot of inspiration to finally try out org-mode, I've installed Emacs again.

For years, I'd read bits and pieces about org-mode, so using it for tracking work projects seemed like a good idea, because maintaining tab groups in Chrome, saved messages in Slack, and a variety of Confluence docs isn't scalable. My bullet journal does an okay job of tracking digital stuff, but having a single org file to overlook an entire project with links to all of the remaining tickets, PRs, RFCs, docs, discussions, notes for project updates, etc. has to be digital. Over the past few years, I was trying to use a variety of setups in things like Notion and Confluence for this, but I couldn't wield those tools the way I wanted to. I'd still get lost in a sea of browser tabs, and I don't actually like spending all of my time in the browser. Sometimes being able to escape the distracting nature of a browser is a feature.

But I think this passage from the blog post May I recommend thinking of Emacs as your Fortress of Solitude really hit me with some feelings I know I'm not alone in feeling lately:

You might know about Superman's Fortress of Solitude. It is where he goes to recuperate, to heal, to collect his thoughts, to plan his next move. Whatever happens out there, he knows what he is coming back to, to his equipment, memorabilia, laboratory, all of it how he set it up, just for himself. His personal space, his home base, his sanctuary.

Well, Emacs is not so much different!

1. Due to how flexible and extensible it is, you can truly make it your own, personal and unique.
2. It exists outside of external events, as a piece of standalone, evergreen tech that has existed for 50y now and will likely be here for as many more, not influenced by hype or governed by a single company.
3. It gives you the space you need to collect your thoughts, to plan, to write, to build your knowledge base, to create.
4. It allows you to create your own custom tools and workflows, uniquely suited for you.

The highlighted sentence is really the crux of it for me. At the moment there's so much churn in almost every product and company as every organisation scrambles to make AI their new personality, much like they did with cryptocurrencies back in the 2010s, albeit with more success this time. And as someone whose job is really in the middle of all of this, constantly having to adapt to the churn is exhausting, so having something constant that I can always come back to, that won't become the victim of a rugpull or a new financial year incentive to overhaul its UI, is important.

Part of that is my analog journaling system - my bullet journal - and, for digital things, that's now Emacs.