Emacs

Overview

Emacs is a text editor that is often hailed for its ability to be customized. People use it for their agenda, RSS feeds, code editing, and more. By extending the base packages, vim keybindings can be used, LSPs can be configured, etc.

Terms

Projects - Just a folder.
Layers - Specific to Spacemacs: A set of toggleable configurations to bring packages together.
Modes - There are major and minor modes. Simply changes how text input affects the buffer.
Packages - Extending the base functionality of Emacs.

Highlights

Org Mode

There’s a rabbit hole called org-mode which I encourage you to at least consider. It’s useful for keeping an agenda, creating todos, knowledge management, documentation, etc.

GDQuest has a solid intro video here. A good follow-up is this video about tagging with org-mode.

Frequently recommended org extensions:

Magit

In Neovim, my favorite git UI is lazygit. Unfortunately it’s not that popular. In Emacs, my favorite git UI is the git UI for Emacs. It has everything. You could even start a Pull Request with a few key taps.

I haven’t tried it yet, but people also swear by Magit for resolving merge conflicts.

Emacs Pre-Built Distributions

Doom Emacs

My Doom Emacs config lives at https://github.com/ZaneH/doom-emacs-config

Doom Emacs Keybinds

As you press keys, watch the menu that appears at the bottom of the screen to find more useful keybinds.

Keybind	Description	Custom
`C-w C-w`	Window selection
`SPC p p`	Select project
`SPC o t`	Toggle terminal
`g s SPC`	Jump to text
`SPC g g`	Open Magit (git)
`SPC n r f`	Find a roam note
`SPC n r i`	Insert roam note here
`SPC n j j`	New journal entry
`M-d`	Highlight next occurrence
`SPC r i`	Multi-cursor edit highlighted	Yes
`SPC p i`	Refresh file cache

Spacemacs

The first time I used Emacs was with Spacemacs. In my experience, Spacemacs is slow.

Spacemacs Keybinds