Mastering Emacs is a slow process: an archeological tour of my (archived) beginnings

If you are reading this, I guess you may be on your way to Emacs enlightenment.

Here I want to give you an (archaeological) taste of how I started with it. I hope that this will give you also a sense of how long it took me to get comfortable with this amazing tool ¹. Ideally, new users that read this will feel comfortable even if, after some months of struggling, they have not yet tamed Emacs: as all the best things in life, learning Emacs takes time and dedication.

I started using Emacs towards the end of 2013, the beginning of my Ph.D. There must be a strong connection between academia's need to publish elegant scientific work (i.e., LaTex) and the adoption of Emacs ².

Anyway, I know that I started roughly then because the oldest Org Archive entry I could find is the following:

* DONE Buy Christmas return ticket <2013-11-09 Sat>                
  :PROPERTIES:
  :ARCHIVE_TIME: 2016-03-25 Fri 14:41
  :ARCHIVE_FILE: ~/.when/todos/myTasks.org
  :ARCHIVE_OLPATH: Daily Stuff
  :ARCHIVE_CATEGORY: myTasks
  :ARCHIVE_TODO: DONE
  :END:

Something interesting is that my first archived note tells us what I was using before Org Mode for my calendar: when by Benjamin Crowell ³. You can guess that from the directory in which I was storing my main Org file.

This reminded me how powerful is to archive your tasks for later memory.

I guess by that point I already familiarized with the basic Emacs editing commands: cancelling an action C-g, undoing an edit C-/, killing C-w and yanking text C-y (i.e., copy/pasting), visit files C-x C-f, and load modes specific to programming languages via the init file (I was writing Bash, Java, Haskell, C#, OCaml, Python and Scala during my studies).

I guess Erc, Emacs' IRC mode, entered my life a year after, when I took note of a chat important for my research:

* DONE have chat with IRC ocaml <2014-10-22 Wed>                   
  :PROPERTIES:
  :ARCHIVE_TIME: 2016-03-25 Fri 14:40
  :ARCHIVE_FILE: ~/.when/todos/myTasks.org
  :ARCHIVE_OLPATH: Ph.D.
  :ARCHIVE_CATEGORY: myTasks
  :ARCHIVE_TODO: DONE
  :END:
@@@ You have joined channel #ocaml                                      [18:39]
@@@ Topic for #ocaml: Discussions about the OCaml programming language |
    http://www.ocaml.org and http://caml.inria.fr |
    http://ocaml.org/releases/4.02.0.html | Public channel logs at
    http://irclog.whitequark.org/ocaml

Notice how I must have still been unaware of Org source blocks and quotations at that time because I was just pasting the raw chat under the heading as a way to log things.

The outcome of a Ph.D. is, mainly, the final thesis, so I started writing my research down in a Org file early on. Emacs' gscholar-bibtex helped a lot with managing references for my LaTex bibliography:

* add gscholar extension to emacs to get bibtex info directly in emacs <2015-11-03 Tue> 
  :PROPERTIES:
  :ARCHIVE_TIME: 2016-03-25 Fri 14:39
  :ARCHIVE_FILE: ~/.when/todos/myTasks.org
  :ARCHIVE_OLPATH: On the fly
  :ARCHIVE_CATEGORY: myTasks
  :END:
use M-x gscholar-bibtex

Today, if you need a bibliography, you should surely look also into org-ref.

I guess 2016 was the turning point for my customization of Emacs. I started using org-contacts for keeping track of birthdays and I finally found the need for Org Archive (all the entries I found were archived on that year).

Immediately after that came the installation of magit and wdired:

* DONE [#B] check out magit and wdired mode for emacs <2016-01-24 Sun> 
  CLOSED: [2016-02-20 Sat 22:52]
  :PROPERTIES:
  :ARCHIVE_TIME: 2016-03-25 Fri 14:39
  :ARCHIVE_FILE: ~/.when/todos/myTasks.org
  :ARCHIVE_OLPATH: On the fly
  :ARCHIVE_CATEGORY: myTasks
  :ARCHIVE_TODO: DONE
  :END:
- [X] magit
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Magit

  | Keys | Effect in Magit mode |
  |------+----------------------|
  | s    | stage new file       |
  | c c  | commit               |
  | b b  | change branch        |
  | P p  | push changes         |
  | F f  | pull changes         |

- [X] dired
  from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jZdul2fC94

  after C-f a directory, the dired buffer will open.
  Here the commands:

  | Keys    | Effect in Dired mode                          |
  |---------+-----------------------------------------------|
  | m       | marks an entry                                |
  | t       | marks all entries that                        |
  |         | are not marked, and unmarks those that are    |
  | u       | unmarks an entry                              |
  | U       | unmarks all entry                             |
  | x       | executes command                              |
  | C       | copies entry                                  |
  | d       | set for deletion                              |
  | D       | asks for deletion                             |
  | !       | calls shell command on entry                  |
  | g       | updates buffer                                |
  | * - /   | marks all directories                         |
  | A       | search for text                               |
  | M - ,   | to see next found results for the text search |
  | R       | renames entry                                 |
  | S       | changes sorting order of directory            |
  | C-x C-q | make buffer editable                          |
  | C-c C-c | commit changes to dir - that changes the fs   |
  | C-h i   | emacs manual                                  |

Evidently I needed a sweeter and efficient way to both manage Git repositories and modify my file system contents swiftly. Note how I was taking notes of keybindings cheatsheets as Org tables: it really takes time for muscle memory to kick in!

My big challenge as a new Emacs user, which I can still remember with uneasiness, was to setup mu4e to read my emails:

* DONE switch to mu4e as email client                        :emacs
  CLOSED: [2016-03-02 Wed 22:18]
  :PROPERTIES:
  :ARCHIVE_TIME: 2016-03-25 Fri 14:39
  :ARCHIVE_FILE: ~/.when/todos/myTasks.org
  :ARCHIVE_OLPATH: On the fly
  :ARCHIVE_CATEGORY: myTasks
  :ARCHIVE_TODO: DONE
  :END:
** THE REASON: Mozilla does not maintain Thunderbird anymore
and the plugin to increase the font ceases to work (blind me!)
** DONE STEP 1: gather information
** DONE STEP 2: OMG, let's install this!
*** DONE understand how to fetch mails
    CLOSED: [2016-03-01 Tue 09:28]
**** offlineimap [5/5]
*** DONE understand how to use smtpmail [4/4]
    CLOSED: [2016-02-29 Mon 23:27]
     - Note taken on [2016-02-29 Mon 23:27] \\
       < C-x m > to send an email
*** DONE install mu (if we get to this victory near :D)
    CLOSED: [2016-03-01 Tue 10:14]
** DONE STEP 3: now read manual LOL
   CLOSED: [2016-03-02 Wed 22:18]
#+BEGIN_SRC sh :results output silent
wget -P /tmp/ https://github.com/djcb/mu-releases/raw/master/mu4e-0.9.16.pdf;
evince /tmp/mu4e-0.9.16.pdf;
#+END_SRC

It felt difficult because I needed to integrate multiple pieces of software while still being a bit uncomfortable with how configuring Emacs itself.

Again it is funny to discover that I had an actual reason to start managing emails from within Emacs other than being a geek: at that time Mozilla ended maintenance for Thunderbird, my previous preferred email client.

Few months later I learned how to maintain my Emacs configuration as an Org Mode file by copying Daniel Mai's approach.

* DONE move to org and use-package 
  SCHEDULED:<2016-06-21 Tue>
  :PROPERTIES:
  :ARCHIVE_TIME: 2016-06-21 Tue 01:06
  :ARCHIVE_FILE: ~/workspace/agenda/myTasks.org
  :ARCHIVE_OLPATH: Daily Stuff
  :ARCHIVE_CATEGORY: myTasks
  :ARCHIVE_TODO: DONE
  :END:

More importantly I started using use-package for my dependencies. At that time I introduced use-package mainly because of its clean syntax. Only much later I learned how to use it to load packages lazily and instrument my configuration to find out initialization problems. By the way, that time must have also been when I started preferring the SCHEDULED timestamp format to Org raw dates.

From then on I started installing programming environments within Emacs, like Ensime, Tuareg and Cider. I also bugged a significant amount of times Pandoc's maintainers to support all the features I needed to export my thesis written in Org Mode via the amazing ox-pandoc.

All in all, Emacs was a majestic investment: I basically literate-programmed away my Ph.D. activities via Org Mode and completed the numerous todos with all the extensions Emacs support.

If you are a new user, a possible checklist to familiarize with Emacs is:

1. learn the basics keybindings with the Emacs tutorial C-h t
2. start using Org Mode to keep track of your todos
3. explore how to extend your Emacs to fulfill your needs, where good resources for this are
   • https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/index.html (this is also in you Emacs C-h r)
   • https://orgmode.org/manual/ (this is also in you Emacs C-h r and then search for "Org Mode")
   • https://planet.emacslife.com/
   • https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/
   • https://www.masteringemacs.org/reading-guide

Again I wish my beginnings (about 3 years actually!) with Emacs let you get that learning this tool is a process. So no rush and enjoy each struggle (and get in touch with the lovely community please)!

Happy enlightening!