This is part of the Emacs: Carnival: Take Two challenge.

This may be hard to believe, but when I first exposed to Emacs, I dismissed it almost immediately. I was taking a Unix class while at in the university and the horrible professor was an Emacs fan. He tried to teach us the basics and failed miserably. The TA, who lectured a few times was a big vi time (note: not vim, but vi) and he was much better at explaining vi than his boss was at explaining Emacs.

A few months later, I got my first tech job (while attending the same University) and we were all on Solaris Sparc workstations (how much does this age me?). The Admin in charge was a zealot vi fan… so much so that when one of the new employees started and installed Emacs in his home folder, the Admin deleted it over the weekend. With a beginning like this, it's no wonder I never even tried Emacs.

At my first post-collegiate job, I helped support a product that ran on SCO Unix (OK, now I'm aging myself). I used to help people set through configs with standard vi over the phone. It was madness. This time of the rise of vim and I was in love.

So why I did switch from Vim to Emacs? Well fast-forward some years and I had switched positions and my needs changed. I don't remember exactly what happened but VimScript was in it's infancy and it wasn't quite living up to my expectations. And then I remember opening several files at once, trying to compare them and Vim wasn't cutting it. I think I had been seeing smart people talk about Emacs and it could do what I wanted. So, I decided to take a week and go cold-turkey on it. I choose XEmacs because that was better on Windows (where I was subjected to then) and I didn't even choose the Vi-emulation but the normal, standard Emacs keys. It was painful at the beginning but then it got a lot better. I went back and forth for a bit after my cold-turkey run but eventually used XEmacs full-time.

I don't know when I switched to GNU Emacs but I think it was because XEmacs hadn't been updated in a while so I gritted my teeth and decided to use Stallman's version. And there I have been ever since. I've changed a lot of configs and the way I write configs and even distros (my own, Prelude, Doom and now back to Prelude). Literally my configs for years was copy-pasted snippets from the Internet and a few packages, the big one I remember was Icicles, an early completion framework.

I've seen a lot of positive changes in Emacs recently (package management being the big one) and, surprisingly a large uptake in activity in Emacs. Maybe that is just be being more aware of things like r/emacs, which is where a lot of Emacs activity takes place. And of course apps like Magit which makes an entire workflow easier.

So this is my history… what is my Take 2? I have a lot…I wish I would have listened to the bad prof early on. More importantly, I also think I should have spent time early learning Elisp instead of blindly copying snippets. I'm still not very good at Elisp – at all. But honestly coding with an AI has helped me a lot in trying to get things configured the way I want – and to teach me some. And I have learned a lot. I also wish I wouldn't have spent so much time declaring configuration bankruptcy and struggled more with my setup..I would have learned more.