Emacs

Emacs is a text editor. GNU Emacs manual describes it as “the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor. I attempted to learn it in 2000 but failed to follow through it.

Around 2020, when i switched to Linux , i also tried the plain text accounting software Beancount . I decided to use emacs for accounting data entry.

When i searched around for emacs, i was surprised by the number of emacs variants. Based on past learnings, i started with vanilla emacs so that official documentation can be used, if and when the need arises.

Configuration

For the sake of consistency i kept my emacs config file in .config/emacs folder. I created a link to it from .emacs.d:

prabu@homepc2 ~> ls -al|grep emacs
lrwxrwxrwx    1 prabu    prabu           25 Mar 18  2021 .emacs.d -> /home/prabu/.config/emacs

After the usual trial and error and referring to multiple dotfiles, i ended up with a stable init.el version. I started maintaining it as part of my dotfiles repository. This helps in having a consistent environment irrespective of the OS being Arch or Alpine Linux or Linux Mint . By Dec'24, i converted my configuration file to follow literate configuration. In May'26, finally ended up with a stable Emacs config file maintained in Org Mode .

Customization

Started using better defaults↗ with Hack Font. Choose nord theme when i switched my desktop to Sway . I did try Lambda themes↗ , but reverted back to nord.

I use use-package for managing packages. I did try quelpa, but reverted back after few weeks.

Org Mode

After reading about the benefits of Org Mode converted most of my accumulated HowTo and other notes to org format.

To maintain these notes decided to use a Org Roam based Zettelkasten system. While trying to configure Org Roam, went into a rabbit hole of emacs configuration hell, got lost, cleaned up the mess and learned some on the way.

Amongst the biggest gain include magit and helm based tool stack that included company, org-rifle , hydra , outshine , helm-swoop etc. The helm stack has since been replaced by a leaner alternative made up of corfu, conunsel, embark, marginalia etc around early'26.

org-noter

Installed org-noter packaged in Apr'26 and created the first note . Still not using it effectively due to lack of pdftools package.

IDE

For creating beancount importers, i had to use python . So started with Elpy but later transitioned to default python mode.

Later started using Emacs as IDE for different programming languages like C and C++ when using arduino .

The following webpages were intially referred to:

Sources

© Prabu Anand K 2020-2026