May I recommend ... Trying other editors
For May 2026 of the Emacs Carnival, the theme set by Sacha Chua is
May I recommend…
I am still a student, and so I am surrounded by people using many different setups. Among the student body, scarce few among them use Emacs, and it is mostly a few of my professors who I sometimes will see use Emacs, and among those most of them use Doom Emacs.
This has the fortunate side-effect of allowing me a glimpse into what other people value in a text editor. The vast majority just want to get set up quickly and thus choose VSCode. For many, VSCode is great, and it allows you to quickly get going. For someone like me who likes to tinker with their tools and make them uniquely theirs befitting a specific workflow, VSCode is lacking, but for the vast majority, it works amazingly well.
Others, like some of my coworkers at my job, use Vim. Being an Evil (which would have been my second recommendation!) user, I understand their fondness of the tool. Vim bindings are great, even if using them does make me dangerously close to a heretic in the eyes of the church.
Thus, may I recommend trying other editors?
I understand this recommenendation seems strange at first. It’s not like people give Emacs an earnest try and try to learn from it, but bear with me.
Try out VSCode, try out a cool editor like Helix, or try to see if you can figure out all the hype about the editor of the beast’s successor, Vim (Or more likely Neovim, which seems to be the newer tool most people use).
See what people like about them, and see if Emacs has something similar, or if we are somehow lacking.
I personally found emacs -nw to be a hidden gem after trying out Vim and loving to work within the terminal despite it being possible to do a lot of the same within Emacs. (Even if I have yet to improve my implementation to work better when called in no-window mode)
The biggest lesson I have taken from my personal venture into other editors is this:
Emacs is powerful, but hard to use.
Our keybindings are unique, the out-of-the-box experience is rather lackluster, and we have so many ways to do something that it can be hard for a newcomer to get started unless they are determined to learn the tool. Our online documentation found when searching on the internet is either aged, or very targeted towards a specific author’s idea of how Emacs should be used.
I have not decided whether I find these to be weaknesses of the editor, or just makes Emacs a specialist tool for only the kind of people who can tolerate a somewhat steep learning curve (eerily similar to another one of my recent interests, Nix). However, I like seeking out experiences, and I have spent the last few years trying out many different editors, and every time I come back to realize that I prefer Emacs. Because I can make it uniquely mine, and it has tools I value a lot.
Some other thoughts I had in regards to the topic of this month:
- Recommending documentation: Perhaps Emacs would be better if we all spent just half an hour every week looking at our favorite packages and looked at whether we could help improve its internet documentation. It is what a lot of people see first, and many packages have limited documentation that does not show everything the package has to offer.
- Recommending learning tests: I recently discovered ERT and thought about learning more about it.
- Recommending reading others’ work: I make it a point to read every carnival post of the month if I’m participating myself, and found Case Duckworth’s post on Emacs bankruptcy hit close to home, and both Curtis McHale and Martin Stemplinger’s post on slowing down and iterating one’s configuration more thoughtfully interesting. Giampaolo Guiducci was a read I thought I would heavily dislike, since I am not a fan of AI and have tried to limit my own use of it. I still dislike using AI to write software, but I do think their writing on the topic of “vibesmacsing” is interesting, because it is a reality that more and more people are using AI to customize their software and is among the reasons why I consider documentation so important in order to be approachable to newcomers.