My Emacs Key Workflow Moments Over The Last 30 Years

I am just at the moment reflecting on how my experience with Emacs over the last 30 years has evolved. I thought that just for fun I would list all the key moments along my Emacs journey regarding work-flow efficiency breakthroughs, roughly in year order!.

I think you can see that my investment of time has spiked in recent years, probably spurred on by writing this blog!

Firstly I went through the barren years… :

and then when I started to get a little more serious about Emacs :

Note that I have endeavoured to incorporate some level of completion framework into my work-flow, systems such as company and corfu but I always end up just using hippie-expand wrapped around dabbrev.

I think this is why I have always been drawn to Emacs, it is just me and a text editor, there is no clutter and no distractions, although there is so much more to Emacs than just a text editor, everything else is hidden away. I don’t really want inline completion popups as I type, I don’t need a menu bar, scroll bars, a source code tree and I tend to always work on a single monitor so the saving on screen real estate is very beneficial to the way I work.

I am a Software Engineer now of 30 years, I am stuck in my ways, stuck with Emacs, but I am happy, productive and efficient!

P.S. and yes I’m starting to play around with plantuml 🙂