In 2018, Sascha Fast of zettelkasten.de was on a minimalist task management journey and dug into Emacs org-mode, and pressured me for days (we were sharing an apartment back then) to give it a shot, because it surely would be my jam.

While I knew Emacs existed, I didn’t feel compelled to even try it.

I did use Emacs as part of a compulsory University course on UNIX and terminal program basics. We went through the Emacs tutorial on our own terms there. I picked up a couple of shortcuts that turned out to be available system-wide on Macs, too, like Ctrl-D to delete forward, for example, and I used that a lot on laptop keyboards that only come with a dedicated backspace key. But using Emacs for anything outside that course didn’t feel too appealing. I did use it for assignments, because I liked it somewhat better than the other options for text editing on our computer terminals at Uni.

Still, I was very happy with TextMate and other “Mac-assed Mac apps”, so I didn’t bother using the software we had to use from our University terminals for more than absolutely necessary, even though it was fun to hack around in such a bare-bones environment. – Oh, if only I knew how not-bare-bones Emacs in particular was! Nobody told me about the package system at University! For example, I used Emacs to edit source files, then Ctrl-Z to move it to the background, compile from the shell, then move Emacs to the front again. I could’ve done all of this and more from within Emacs, and I didn’t know. So that was my first Emacs experience as a terminal-based text editor that had some weird but learn-able text editing shortcuts. (If only I knew …)

When I got my first Mac, I already had a laundry list of must-have apps. That was in 2008. And during that time, OmniFocus came out (work-in-progress page from 2007), and I just needed to have that app. I used it as my project and task management tool for years, with short stints into trying out Things actu. So in 2018, I had all my stuff in OmniFocus: private tasks, programming projects everything. I didn’t want to switch. It took Sascha a lot of convincing until I caved because of that. But I gave it a try eventually the more features and tweaks and packages he brought up. A digital nerd cave was promised, and boy did it deliver.

I found Emacs Lisp weird, but the malleability of the system sounded just too appealing. I was amazed that plain text UI’s could be ab-used to render so many details. Eventually, I managed to make Emacs look okay (I’m a software developer, so my standards for ‘okay’ are quite low to be productive). It eventually didn’t feel like a downgrade. OmniFocus handled copy-pasting of images and other files as task attachments nicely, and org-mode …. well, I gave up on using attachments and inline images/screenshots as much early on to focus on other things, and 7 years later still haven’t bothered to look into this for most of my .org files.

What I did adopt early on was a modal key binding by Xah Lee. All web searches for Emacs Lisp tips went to his site (or Sacha Chua’s), and Xah clearly is into ergonomics, so I gave it a shot and loved it.

Especially the B key in command mode, bound to xah-toggle-letter-case. It cycles the region or the word next to the point between capitalizing the first letter, lowercase, and all caps. I used this a lot when proof-reading and editing book manuscripts and blog posts in our collaboration at zettelkasten.de. Really, it’s not funny how often I pressed this key.

The Xah Fly Keys command mode (aka default/non-insert mode) also comes with very nice text movement keys without having to press any modifiers. It’s easier to visualize when you check out the key binding graphic:

You end up with arrow keys on I, J, K, L, on QWERTY. And then above the left arrow (J) and the right arrow (L), you have U and O bound to move by word boundary backward and forward, respectively. And to the outside, left and right of J and L, you have H and : to move to beginning and end of line, respectively.

It’s like an arrow key cluster, but enlarged.

When proof-reading, this and the case toggle key binding did a lot of the heavy lifting. It’s much nicer to have all the movement keys next to the right-hand home row than having to hold the Opt key and use arrow keys to move by word boundary on Mac. Much, much nicer.

This sold me to the idea that if I’m spending such an ungodly amount of time in a text editor anyway, I should be able to do these kinds of customizations to make it fit my work.

Eventually, I uninstalled TextMate (after more than a decade of use) and OmniFocus.

When I did, I also went down other rabbit holes to move email, version control, shell interaction, … into Emacs. Because I could, so why wouldn’t I …?