Posts on Exploring Emacs

Emacs in the Workspace

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 06:41:01 -0400

Beyond Tabs

At the end of the previous year, I wrote about Emacs's support for tabs, a simple convenience feature but one I thought worth highlighting because it is useful and not enabled by default, at least not in GNU Emacs. It is certainly an essential part of my Emacs setup, something I turn on immediately after installing it on a new system. But it also got me thinking about workspace management in a more general sense, and I realized that the framework of tabs, frames and windows as they are implemented by Emacs are instances of a more general pattern, which is what I want to explore today.

Emacs for Cheating

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:30:26 -0400

If you, like me, rarely go through a day in which you don't spend at least some time typing away at a command line, there are certain commands you use so frequently that they migrate into your fingertips. The terse, cryptic syntax of the CLI tools eventually become as natural and frictionless as speaking. But even the tools you use every day likely support options that you never have a need for. Whatever your level of proficiency at the command line, it is gained not by mastering every command, or even any specific command. Rather, it is a matter of repetition, of learning what works for different situations that reoccur regularly, and of developing many individual habits that together constitute a skill set.

Take Control of Your Buffers With Ibuffer-Mode

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 18:24:41 -0500

Last time we met, I discussed how Emacs provides tab-bar-mode for tabbed navigation, and how it is a useful organizational tool for your Emacs workflow. Exciting stuff! And today I will be continuing the excitement by discussing one of my annoyances with Emacs, and how to handle it.

Buffer Bloat

The buffer is a basic data structure in Emacs. As a Text User Interface (TUI) platform, everything you interact with is stored as text in a buffer, whether that is code you are developing, a blog post you are writing, or the input to and output from an interactive shell.

Keeping Tabs With Emacs

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 12:12:33 -0500

I have a hazy memory of the first time I ever fired up Emacs, not knowing my Meta key from my elbow. That was a long time ago now, but I vaguely recall the experience of having no idea how to do the first thing, not even opening a file. This was followed by many months of slowly developing fluency, building up my muscle memory of keystrokes along with a mental model of how Emacs works.

Emacs the Symbiont

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 04:06:15 -0500

One thing that makes Emacs stand out as an editor and a software system is its symbiotic integration of a dynamic programming environment with a text editor. This is a peanut butter and chocolate sort of combination, greater than the sum of its parts. It is not unique in being an extensible, scriptable editor. What is unique is the specific fusion of a Lisp system with an editor whose editing primitives are all implemented in that language. To understand why this is, we'll need to take a step back and talk a bit about the Lisp family of languages.

Exploring Emacs

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:29:30 -0500

Emacs is like no other piece of software in existence.

In some sense it is simply a text editor. There are many editors out there, of various degrees of sophisitication. If you are just trying to edit configuration files on a Linux server, then by all means, stick with vi or vim. They are more likely to be available on any random system you happen to find yourself on, and have a nice terse set of key strokes for editing commands. If you are doing day-to-day development, use Visual Studio Code. I use it everyday at my day job. Lots of people do. Or Neovim. I've never messed with it, but lots of people seem to like it. Nano, Pico, Sublime Text, Notepad++, whatever gets the job done.