May I recommend thinking of Emacs as your Fortress of Solitude

First thing I do when I turn on my computer is open my Emacs.

What awaits me is a blank, dark purple screen with a random motivational quote on top.

I will usually take a moment, enjoy the calmness of the empty canvas in front of me.

There is nothing fighting for my attention, nothing I have to react to. Just the familiar comforting view, patiently waiting for me.

#+begin_disclaimer

You might start thinking at this point, ok another stereotypical crazy Emacs user, sitting in his basement whole day writing C, browsing web with JS disabled, chatting on IRC and reading his email in his Emacs.

However, IMHO, I (and many others) am more unlike that stereotype than you might imagine!

It has been long time since I have written any C, lately it has been mostly TypeScript (ok and some Haskell I admit). I don't even code much these days! I am a founder/CTO of a startup and I spend most of my time hiring, managing, reviewing, emailing, marketing, strategizing. I have a family, small kids, a dog, hobbies (even some that are not Emacs). I read my email and browse web in Chrome, use Notion, G Suite, Discord, LLMs (not for writing though), and I never managed to get into IRC.

#+end_disclaimer

That unassuming blank canvas, inviting you to type? That is the scratch buffer .

It's there every time you start Emacs, by default. And while it may not seem like anything special, it says a lot about Emacs. No code editor I know of comes with such blank canvas. Text editors often do, but as a starting poing for a new document. Instead, in Emacs, it is just an unassuming canvas you can "scratch" on, assignment of meaning left to you.

Once in Emacs, I will usually open my daily schedule/agenda , which is only a key combo away. I hit o d and in front of me is:

my daily checklist

scheduled events for today (synced from my gcalendar)

a list of tasks I planned for today + any from earlier days I haven't finished

some general notes

my inbox (of tasks, GTD style).

Figure 1: My daily agenda with a task open

Pressing e while on any task or event opens up its "page" where I can take any notes and work on it. I will also often "clock in" a task I am working on right now, tracking how long I am working on it, which I found very effective to maintain focus. Later I can also generate a report of time tracked.

At the end of the work day, I will hit o c w j and write down my journal entry, just a couple of sentences reflecting on the work day.

Figure 2: Writing a new daily journal entry

Later in the day, I might start working on a non-trivial task .

Maybe it is a coding task, or it is a hiring strategy, or coming up with the new version of content for the landing page, or planning next sprint, or it is writing a longer, important email or Discord message.

Often, I will start with opening the task's "page" in Emacs and start writing it up and breaking it down there.<br>I will put down what I know so far, define the requirements, collect links to the materials I have, brainstorm, create subtasks with relevant TODO statuses, put some time estimates, … .

At any moment, pressing i c opens up chat with an LLM model of my choice in Emacs if I need it, with access to any open buffers ("tabs"/"docs") and whatever tools I defined for it (or whole Emacs if I decide to give it).

' opens up the terminal, and I can of course also run e.g. Claude Code or OpenCode from it.

File manager is just d d away, while g g opens magit, Emacs' crazy good interface for anything Git-related, all of these in the context of the current project or buffer.

If I want to focus on writing, like right now, I will hit a w and only a single window will remain open, with text centered in the middle. A kind of a "Zen mode".

While doing all this, I am using the same keybindings and commands the whole time to move around, to edit text, to search, to manipulate windows, … . It's all one tightly integrated environment, smoothly flowing from one workflow to another.

Figure 3: Reviewing the sprint plan with LLM.

Why am I talking about my usage patterns above?

I am trying to demonstrate how Emacs goes beyond just an editor / IDE. Often you will hear that Emacs is not an editor, but an OS (operating system). I get where this comes from, but I don't think it does much favors to Emacs, as it presents it as something overly complex that you don't really need (I am already running Emacs on my OS, why would I need it to also be OS?). Or you might hear that Emacs is a "computing environment", and while I got to love that description once I got deep enough into Emacs, I don't think it does much for anybody new to it.

Instead, I would like to invite you to think of Emacs as your (digital) home base .

You might know about Superman's Fortress of Solitude . It is where he goes to recuperate, to heal, to collect his thoughts, to plan his next move. Whatever happens out there, he knows what he is coming back to, to...