I wrote a few days ago how I took a bet to use Emacs. I wrote that a few days after starting, and now it’s been a full week. It has been an adventure.

First off, let me tell you that my Emacs config is well over 500 lines long. There aren’t a ton of comments. You can see it here. I also have a nice screen shot to share with you.

Emacs Week 1

The funny thing is, I was sure that this was going to be horrible. Oh, I had every intention of winning the bet, but I figured I’d have to suffer in order to do it. As I said in my post, though, I’ve had fun.

The few days after writing that post, I’ve had even more fun. I’ve added tons to my config.

  • I made my Markdown look better. Now in normal mode, the links are shortened just to their titles and show a nice icon.
  • I’ve continued to tweak my evil mode bindings to better suit my vim leanings.
  • I’ve added better vterm support.
  • Fixed my status line at the bottom
  • Added in Ivy for FZF support
  • Added a word count section to my status line.
  • Added in Git support
  • Added in vim like tab support, with all the keybindings I’m used to.
  • And so, so much more. (I added better markdown support for my lists while I was writing this post)

Emacs is Just Vim Now⌗

Emacs 2

The Emacs guys aren’t going to like what I’m doing to their precious elisp interpreter. I’m making it as much like Vim as I possibly can. I love vim, and I enjoy the way it works. I’m primarily using Emacs as a text editor, so it makes sense to me to make it function in a way that I enjoy. And I don’t really enjoy the way Emacs works. The devs definitely loved their keychords. Everything, and I do mean everything is a keychord. Which is just so inefficient. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love me some keychords too. But when you make everything buried beneath multiple key strokes, you’re just not being efficient. It also makes everything harder to remember, forcing you to rely on autocompletion.

So, I’ve made my Emacs into the best damn homemade Vim replacement that I could. It’s not quite Doom Emacs, but I’ve stolen some ideas from them. I promised when I made the bet that I would stick with vanilla emacs, and not turn to a fork. Well, I’ve done that. This is 100% my work. Well, that’s a lie. I didn’t know how to do any of this shit, as I do not know lisp. I’ve learned a lot over the last week, and there’s nothing hard here, but I am still very much a noob. What I’ve done is about 40 hours worth of Googling to get where I am now. Emacs users love to share their configs, so I’ve been able to find almost all of what I needed to make my config. So when I say it’s all my work, what I mean is that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, and that my copy and paste ability is very strong.

Things I Am Struggling With⌗

I’m used to doing all of my work inside the terminal. So I SUPER + RETURN and open Kitty, then vim. Now, I don’t go into the terminal, instead I open Emacs. It has taken the entire week to get this into my brain. Still I find myself sometimes in the terminal doing other things and doing my old v alias to get into a config file. I have set that up to use Emacs in the terminal, but it’s just not as good as the GUI version of Emacs. Some of my Evil keybinds don’t work, the text is all horrible, and it is much slower. So, I almost always back out of that and move on to the GUI version.

Another thing is, this has been a lot of work. I’m not joking when I say I’ll be working on something and then have to go edit my config file to get something to work the way I want it to work. This happened a lot more at the beginning of the week, but sometimes I still find myself needing something that I don’t have, so I have to pause what I’m doing to go figure out what I need. The latest example, as I said above, is adding in better list support for markdown files.

One thing I know that I’ve failed at is that I’ve been doing a lot of duplication of effort, despite me grabbing a lot of my stuff from Stack Overflow. There have to be Emacs Packages that do a lot of the things I’ve worked in by hand. Some of the stuff I’ve added, therefore, is probably pretty janky. I know that I’ve gotten a ton of errors that I’ve then needed to Google. This has taken a lot of time.

I think that bit will get better. I feel like I’m basically done for now, though I know I’ll find other things I want to add. Right now I think this is as functional as I need it to be, so I should now just be able to use this thing without the constant Googling.

I’m Going to Win⌗

The bet is mine. Darth Vader, the guy I made the bet with, has no chance. I’m even more confident now than I was before. The more I get into Emacs, the more I feel like this can work, and it will work for however long it takes Darth to fail at his end of the bet. I’ll actually be pretty upset now if he messages me in a week telling me he’s hopping off of openSUSE. I’ve put in all this damn work, I don’t want to have to leave it all behind so soon. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll run my fat ass right back to Vim, but I’ll still be annoyed. So Darth, if you’re reading, try to win. That way I get a chance to enjoy my labors here in Emacs land, at least for a little while.

That’s it. I don’t know if I’ll post any more updates on my time with Emacs. Maybe, if Darth and I actually manage to outlive the bet, and get to the two year deadline, I’ll make a long term review. But otherwise, I’m just going to get used to being an Emacs user. FML.

This is day 10 of Blaugust 2025.