It took me a decade to try Emacs again, for reasons totally unrelated to computer programming (task management!), and a lot of effort by my pal Sascha Fast. In hindsight, I realize I had to learn a couple of things first.

• Emacs is clumsy and old. I didn’t know that a GUI Emacs version existed, could display images and scroll somewhat smoothly, coming from an IT department with SUN terminals where we used Emacs on the command-line to edit some .c source files. By modern standards, it’s lean and snappy and can do interesting things using your OS’s window manager for multi-frame workflows (like displaying a ‘Speedbar’ for symbol navigation). In 2026, Emacs will learn to efficiently draw at 60+ FPS to a canvas, multiple in parallel even, to display movies and play video games. I’m not joking!
• Text is not enough. Text, I realized eventually, is plenty! The customizable Org Agenda got me hooked: filter through tasks, display a magic ‘UI’ that fits my needs, amazing. That’s all possible because Emacs deals with (not necessarily file-backed) buffers all the way down. With directory listings, server management, and using Emacs to complement and complete computing all around, the game has changed. Instead of TUI, I read for … EUI?
• I’ll only use this for to-do’s. I absolutely didn’t. 7 years (oh god) later I’m still discovering new excused to use Emacs for new things. Starting with task management, I also made this my Writeroom-like writing workspace, used it for copy-editing books and innumerable blog posts in various projects, tweaked and learned to love a custom key binding mechanism, moved light scripting over, then more and more programming and web development tasks. Email, chat, eventually LLM chat interfaces and Agentic Engineering; everything is being swallowed by the Universal Paperclip machinery that is this weird Lisp interpreter.
• I will copy and paste config snippets most of the time. I used StackOverflow, Sacha Chua’s blog, Xah Lee’s blog and Elisp reference as stepping stones. I still grab stuff from other people’s configurations and test-drive them. But I also found a strange joy in writing Lisp, and got into reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and finally understood the mechanics and beauty of the composition so much better. In a way, it helped me think more clearly about functions, composition, and what makes good software.

I didn’t sign up for all that happened at first. But I got sucked in, and as I mentioned in passing so many times, Emacs is an isle of computing freedom in an environment of ever tighter sandboxes, locking-down and dumbing down computers, making the operating system UI ugly as sin – it’s not great to be in love with computers unless you find your way onto a capable Linux machine. Or, like me, who’s stuck on a Mac for work, use Emacs to maintain their sanity. (That’s probably not a line any longer-term Emacs user ever said.)