Emacsen

Ok, so you (and by you, I mean jack) will be happy to hear, that I’ve mostly settled on being an emacs user. I mean, I’m not killer good at it, but this evening as I moved back to my Mac exclusively for a few days (I’m writing this during a quick jaunt out of town and my mac is the laptop) I downloaded a GUI version of emacs, because… well, I think the less that’s said the better.

This is strange for me, because for a long time, I thought that moving to linux would be all about an adaptation to vi(m)–for those of you playing along at home, vim is the “competing” text editor to emacs. Emacs was always that overly complicated editor that did too much, and vim’s modal¹ design is kinda brilliant, and I was taken.

But as I’ve said before, vim is great, but it’s not perfect for what I’m doing. My MO in TextMate has been to use it to do as many things as I can. Which is more inline with the way that people tend to use emacs. So I switched (haven’t started to use it for writing emails, yet), and it’s mostly pretty great, but it’s hard to get used to.

I was going to say “it’s just a bit weird,” or “things seem hard to find,” or “functionality isn’t as standardized as it is in TextMate,” but I’m not sure that this is really true. I mean, there are some clear differences between emacs and TextMate, but TextMate is very clearly influenced² by emacs, so it’s not that alien. And the M-x command line makes things really easy to find, so that’s not an issue. So maybe my only complaint is that the various modes for emacs aren’t as consistent as the languages/bundles for TextMate. This might be the case, but it also might be the fact that I don’t edit many different kinds of text, so I’m not a great judge of this.

So while I’m on this subject, let me make a list of the kinds of text files that I edit. Because it’s my blog, and I can:

• Markdown Documents: I use markdown formating a lot (with longlines and flyspell minor modes in emacs). These documents tend to range from about 1,200 to 4,000 words, and I write them for work (technicalish documents) and also my fiction is all written in these kinds of files.
• Blog posts. Also in markdown these are shorter, but in TextMate at least these have email style headers that interface with the blog-posting client. In emacs, I’ve been using these headers (as I don’t like the blogging mode very much.
• Screen Plays. There’s a great mode in emacs for screenplays that doesn’t have some of the nifty completions that the TextMate counterpart has, but I think overall the interface is better.
• Occasional PHP/css/html files. I do websites, this is a necessary thing, and this is the most “programer” thing that I do. Even really sucky text editors do this pretty well. I might also from time to time edit shell scripts and hopefully do some python stuff in the future, but again, not a big issue.
• Outlining/Journaling. I’m not a big “one giant text file” kind of guy, but doing some kind of structured document outside of basic markdown formated text is nice. I’ve been using a “journal” bundle for TextMate for this, and there are a few others.
• Editing LaTeX documents. I haven’t done a lot of this recently, but one of my “things” is using LaTeX to do all of my “production” document editing. For most things I tend to write in markdown and then translate to LaTeX for production, but I have a couple of LaTeX documents and templates that I just do in LaTeX. I need to explore this more, but I’ve touched on it a bit, and I’m a fan so far.

Are there other emacs modes that I should be checking out that I’m not, seemingly, aware of? Thanks in advance!