Published 2026-11-01
tag(s): #linux #programming #emacs
Recently this article (which I haven't read 👀) was posted to both reddit (still trying to quit) and Slashdot (one of the sites that would replace reddit, at least for tech news) about the 50th anniversary of Emacs.
Seeing that reminded me to check my notes (technically, emails) and September 2026 was my
10th anniversary as an Emacs user.
Back in 2016, I wouldn't have imagined I was going to publish open source code with a GPL
license (which I did in my last few repositories). It's not that I didn't know about the Free
Software movement, I just didn't care.
Back then I wasn't a Linux user. I had a passing idea of what Lisp was, but couldn't have
recognized it at a glance. I didn't care about privacy, digital rights...
A while ago (late 2024, as per the email) I was digging in my old @outlook.com
account looking for the first version of my init.el file.
I did not have a dotfiles repository, but
instead emailed myself from work to personal accounts the file attached, or little
snippets.
What I found instead was an even bigger relic.
Sometime in 2016, I got moved from one business unit to the other in the client I was working
at. I was already in Denver, but everyone else was getting relocated or hired. While those
moves happened, I had a couple weeks of downtime to myself, with no tasks assigned. So I
tried Emacs (and never got around to trying vi, which was the next step =P).
I put together an Excel spreadsheet, formatted to print as big as possible in a whole page,
with keybindings I learned from the tutorial and online articles. I have many versions of this
in my old mailbox. The oldest one was one dated September 16th 2016, and I sent it to current
account, as a keepsake. You can see it here, in this Fastmail-generated preview:
So, there you go. My 10th Emacsversary.
It seems exaggerated, since it is just a text editor after all, but...
For starters, Emacs blew my mind in that there comes this really old piece of software with things like clipboard history, multiple windows, compilation support for multiple programming languages. In fact, many features (like windows and frames) are "misnamed" in Emacs...if only because it has supported them before their names were standardized.
On top of that, by 2016 I could already see the limitations in Visual Studio. I still think
very highly of it, but I remember how little changes from 2012 onwards
impacted my workflow. For example, the removal of commands to open Find Results 1 and Find
Results 2 using the keyboard. Yes, oddly specific....... 🙂
It was obvious that whatever direction the IDE was taking, I had to accept it. It
wasn't mine. Unlike Emacs, where everything could be
configured in ways that I had never seen in any software before. Or since, to be honest.
That level of ownership of software was the gateway to the Free Software movement. And that changed forever my personal values not only in relation to software, but digital rights and privacy. If I told my old self in 2016 that I was an EFF donor, I would have laughed.
I dared to install Linux some time later, in part because I was already using Emacs for...well, everything. So if the underlying system was Windows or Linux, it didn't matter.
And that was my first contact with a Lisp, which eventually led me to Common Lisp, and a
repeat of familiar experience: finding out this really old language and ecosystem
already had years ago a lot of the features that I saw being added to C#, JS or
Python.
Suddenly, nothing seemed as impressive as CL or Emacs. And honestly, still doesn't...
None of that would have happened if I didn't try Emacs for Windows back then.
Which is why I care so much about my own Emacs packages working on Windows. And to provide
support for the poor corporate users (like myself) that ask for help in the Emacs subreddit
and are unhelpfully suggested to install Linux or WSL. 🙂