Bicycle For Your Mind
Part Three of My Battles with Emacs
Futility
The experiment is over. I quit Emacs.
The short version is the inability to trust simple things like copy and paste. I copy something from Safari and paste it into an Emacs buffer, it works fine. The problem is in the other direction. When I copy something in an Emacs buffer and paste it into another program, the text which was copied in Emacs is missing from the clipboard. When it works, I am surprised. It fails intermittently and that irks me.
The long version is that the program requires and encourages endless tweaking. It is a commendable goal. “Create the text editor you want.” I like the idea of that, but I don’t like the reality. This endless tweaking is getting into the way of me doing anything productive. The tweaking is not natural for me. It is a lot of google searches, trying things out, trying to understand why it worked, or why it didn’t. It is a tremendous time sink. Emacs is a learning experience, but it takes way too much time.
This is compounded by Doom Emacs. My lack of expertise with Vim is mixed with the lack of expertise with Emacs. Leading to me tearing out my non-existent hair. Not an enjoyable experience.
Yes. It was deeply frustrating. It was also exciting. Org-mode is an interesting beast. I loved parts of it. If you are willing to give this a few years, Emacs with org-mode is a worthy journey to be on. I am unfortunately too old for that particular journey.
With immense regret. I give up.
Thanks to Photo by Sem Steenbergen from Pexels
macosxguru at the gmail thingie.