Ways Emacs Has Changed What I Do
Tags: emacs, developer, productivity
Published: 2020-07-24 03:09:16

---
title: Ways Emacs Has Changed What I Do
published: true
description: Emacs has changed more than just the way I write code
tags: emacs, developer, productivity
canonical_url: https://ryanfaulhaber.com/posts/things-emacs-has-changed/
//cover_image: https://direct_url_to_image.jpg
---

[Previously](https://ryanfaulhaber.com/posts/try-emacs/) I had written about trying Emacs, but looking back on that post I felt like I was bit vague about the ways in which it&rsquo;s changed the things I do, so I wanted to provide some examples. Emacs has replaced a number of programs in my life, and not all of them are developer related.


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# Programming

If you can believe it, this is maybe the most underwhelming part. Don&rsquo;t get me wrong, though! Emacs is a great editor obviously, and it has all the conveniences of a more modern editor and much more. I did want to talk about what it&rsquo;s like to write code in Emacs though, briefly.

Being a web developer I write a lot of JavaScript, and as you&rsquo;d imagine there&rsquo;s a bunch of extensions in Emacs for writing JavaScript. Emacs has a package called [quickrun](https://github.com/emacsorphanage/quickrun) that can evaluate code in buffers on the fly.

![img](https://ryanfaulhaber.com/images/quickrun.png)

As someone who sometimes needs a reminder on the particularities of how certain JavaScript methods work, this is very useful!


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# Journaling

I&rsquo;ve always wanted to get into the habit of journaling. For the last few years of my life I&rsquo;ve been through a couple of journaling apps, some of which I&rsquo;ve paid for! Bur for whatever reason I could never get into the habit. I&rsquo;d start out strong and then stop a week or two in, only to sporadically update.

With Emacs, I&rsquo;ve been journaling almost every day for the last two months or so, and it&rsquo;s all thanks to [org-journal](https://github.com/bastibe/org-journal) (I also think it has something to do with the fact that my journal and all my other Org documents live in the same place, and that Emacs provides a very convenient way of creating new journal entries).


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# Blogging

The biggest benefit of Org mode, like Markdown, is that it&rsquo;s a format that can be easily translated into another format. [ox-hugo](https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/), an Org exporter geared towards converting Org documents into Hugo-compatible Markdown files, is now what I use to manage my blog. Blogging is new to me and I only have a few posts under my belt, but almost all of them have been written as Org documents and exported via ox-hugo (or just as GitHub-flavored Markdown when I post the same thing on dev.to).


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# Note-taking

This is the biggest change.

A lot of what I read could be called academic. Before Emacs I had used Evernote, Notion, Trello, physical notebooks, and other apps that I&rsquo;m probably forgetting to take notes. For some reason it had never occurred to me to take notes as plaintext (I never took notes as Markdown files), but when I learned about Org mode, it seemed natural that I&rsquo;d use it to take notes.

But Emacs let me take it one step further.

I had been reading about [Zettelkasten](https://zettelkasten.de/) and learned about [Roam Research](https://roamresearch.com/). The idea of having a flat note hierarchy with links between all your notes (structurally similar to but functionally different than a Wiki) was immediately appealing to me. Of course, because the Emacs ecosystem is so fully featured, there&rsquo;s a package for that: [org-roam](https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam), which is truly a marvel of an Emacs package.

Although I&rsquo;m still in the process of figuring out how the Zettelkasten method can work with a Roam-like system, I&rsquo;ve already taken extensive notes using org-roam: my org-roam directory currently sits at 323 files, though not all of those files have content.


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# Email

I never thought I&rsquo;d be this person. When you hear about people &ldquo;living&rdquo; in Emacs, this is just part of what they mean.

I host my own private email server (for a guide on how to do this yourself, I strongly recommend [this one](https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/mail-server-guide/). It&rsquo;s the one I used), and I&rsquo;ve never found a great or consistent email client for the desktop. The closest I came was Mailspring, which, although it is nice, it&rsquo;s a bit slow for what it is.

When I first started learning Emacs, I knew you could check your email with it. [mu4e](https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html) will let you do this. You can read, manage, and send email all from Emacs. You can even write emails as Org documents! It&rsquo;s surprisingly easy and consistent to use. It&rsquo;s best used when your emails are plaintext, but [that&rsquo;s generally true too](https://useplaintext.email/).


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# And plenty more&#x2026;

Emacs has changed a lot of what I do in a lot of small ways that I can&rsquo;t really count. It&rsquo;s really a wonderful program, and I can&rsquo;t believe how much I&rsquo;ve come to really love using it. Every day I feel like I&rsquo;m learning something new about it, and it&rsquo;s all such a joy to use! As I said in my last post, you really should give it a try.