I promised more posts, and more posts you shall have. Indeed I have been a busy little bee, and finally I have something to show for it.

When I was blogging frequently, using Octopress, one of the things I did straight away was to write a wrapper for Emacs called octopress.el (view on GitHub), which provides an interactive interface to its basic functions and a few ergonomic benefits like easy image and post URL insertion.

But, as I noted in my previous post, Octopress is effectively dead (and slow, and tricky to set up), so I moved onto Hugo. I immediately missed having an Emacs-based interface directly into Hugo’s essential functions (though eshell works surprisingly well)… So I wrote one. I call it hugo.el.

Does something seem a little “off?” I mean, something other than me posting here after a conspicuously silent gap of over two years…

That’s right, I’m generating the site with Hugo now! No, I didn’t expect you to notice, because everything looks exactly the same. This blog was built by Octopress/Jekyll for years, but after migrating desktops and having to get it all set up each time, I tired of the whole Ruby house of cards that it felt like it was perched upon, so, I switched.

Read on for some of my thoughts, if you care.

I’ve become somewhat more of an Emacs celebrity than I could have predicted. After giving that talk and spending a couple years blogging and tweeting about Emacs, people frequently ask for my opinion or advice regarding its use, how to learn it, or whether to learn it at all.

Today I want to share my long-form answer to a few related questions that I get asked pretty often. Those questions are, roughly:

• Should I start using Evil Mode right away, or learn “pure” Emacs first?
• Should I learn Vim before using Evil Mode?
• Is Emacs the right editor for me if I am a: computer science student, professional programmer, astronaut, whatever?

The answer is: maybe.

As the first quarter of the year reaches its end, my department is deep into planning the work we will do in the second quarter. As you all know, I use Org Mode to sort out all of the details of my work life, including imminent tasks, meetings I need to schedule, and projects I want to work on.

For the last three months I’ve kept notes for all of the projects that my team could possibly put effort toward, as I thought of them. This resulted in a pretty haphazard list of rough ideas and specific tasks intermingled. I needed to get this into a clean, prioritized list… So I learned how to use Refile.

Let me teach you how to use it, too.

If you are a terminal guy as I am, or if you’re a terminal gal, you may be inclined to use Emacs in the terminal as well. A couple of my friends who took up Vim got used to running it within tmux and exchanged one terminal program for the other. This is wrong.

The GUI Emacs program is not just a crutch for the ignorant fools with their fingers all gnarled by mouse overuse; no, GUI Emacs is much more powerful, and there is almost no reason at all to run Emacs in a terminal. Ever.

Let me explain why.