This Year, I'll …

For January 2026 of the Emacs carnival, the theme set by Christian Tietze is

This Year, I’ll …

In late December, I made the switch to a literate configuration. I decided to also renew my configuration as a whole, so many aspects of my Emacs configuration are yet to be decided on or implemented.

This year, I’ll move more of my workflows to Emacs.

I am a Master’s Student in Computer Science, so I need programming environments for among others Rust, Haskell, C, and Python. I also need to set up LaTeX, Markdown, and org-roam. I use LaTeX to typeset my reports and assignments, markdown for this blog and collaboration on some university projects, and org-roam for my digital note-taking for classes.

For the programming environments, I’ll first attempt to make these work together with my existing Eglot workflow, and only switch to lsp-mode if Eglot proves too difficult. For LaTeX, I’m currently considering AucTeX + RefTeX, and will need to read their manuals before making a final decision. For Markdown, I’ll most likely use the built-in option, but with more intelligent templates set up using tempel. For org-roam, I’m still deciding on the best approach. I may ultimately go back to my previous setup, which mimicked Obsidian by creating a “second brain” linking related topics. I have also seen denote being a popular option, so I may take a closer look at that before committing.

For my digital life overall, I want to set up an email client, with mu4e seeming the most promising choice. I doubt that it will be able to handle my Microsoft Exchange mail from my university, but it should work for my private mail and become a good place for the many mailing lists I’ve joined since last year to get more involved in the development of the tools I use. Furthermore, I want to manage my calendar using Emacs, preferably with a setup that syncs to my iPhone for ease-of-use on the go.

Another goal is to improve my Lisp-Fu this year, which means that I’ll read An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp, the GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual, and Emacs Lisp Elements. I expect some overlap between these three, so I’ll most likely end up looking for other resources down the line, but for now it seems like a solid starting point to deepen my understanding of Emacs Lisp and write a better configuration. This should aid in my overall yearly theme of moving more of my workflows to Emacs.

Finally, I want to do more blogging, and by getting into the weeds of Emacs, I should discover interesting tidbits of information or potentially find that I know enough about a topic to write a tutorial on it in order to practice my prose.

By the end of this year, I hope to have Emacs as my primary environment for both academic work and personal productivity, and I hope for it to be a consistent workspace that follows me seamlessly between my Arch Linux workstation at home and my macOS university laptops for classes and work.