This is my submission for the August Emacs Carnival – the Emacs Elevator Pitch.

My pitch is simple, but then it takes a little while to explain:

Emacs works for you, you won't work for Emacs.

Overall I think the heart of my pitch reflects on my own personal belief about Emacs. I believe there is no one version of Emacs. Every Emacs user has it tweaked to their own workflow so each of user has a different Emacs – sometimes slightly different, sometimes greatly different, from yours.

I still use Intellij IDEA when I'm in Javaland. There are extensions that do a lot for you, but you still have to put up with how the app and those extensions work. For example, one of my pet peeves in IDEA is how it places tabs. The file I was just in previously might be buried among how many other tabs there are. It annoys me to no end. I realized that I don't think about this in Emacs. I easily switch buffers in Emacs – it's simply C-x b, I type a vague substring of the buffer name and Helm gets me the lists of buffers that match it. I barely have to think about it, where in IDEA, I have to do a lot of conscious work. I put up with in IDEA because there is nothing I can do. In Emacs, I would not put up with that for very long (and in this case, I have never had to).

I do almost everything in Emacs now but that is recent development. I used to use Obsidian for personal notes and I wanted to move to Emacs. I wrote about that migration here but the point I want to make is that I could. Was it easy to get exactly what I wanted? No it took some trial and error and some creative ELisp (that I'm not afraid to say that AI helped me write). Even putting in my old Obsidian vaults was possible. And I can link write a new note and link to an old one because orgmode lets you make a link to any other file.

This didn't come out of the box but I was able to configure Emacs to do it for me. Not always easy, but always possible. I get an idea of something I want and then make Emacs work the way I want to.

As I said, Emacs works for me, I don't work for Emacs.