xvw.lol - Emacs, how it all started (for me)
Emacs, how it all started (for me)
2026-06-15
This article is a translation, the original version is<br>available here.
I have been using (badly) Emacs since around 2008. In this short article, I will try to present the chaotic path that led me to choose Emacs as my main text and code editor. This is absolutely not a tutorial , but rather a small piece of my personal lore, because it is quite amusing to describe clumsy choices that, in hindsight, turned out to be, in my view, beneficial. This article is largely inspired , while being less ambitious, by the April 2026 topic of the Emacs Carnival.
My prehistoryWriting code with Microsoft Word<br>EasyPHP, Notepad and Notepad++<br>Le Site du Zéro: discovering alternativesExperimenting with as many programming languages as possible
Emacs to the rescue ... on WindowsOne mode per problem and excellent Windows support
Conclusion
While I can have very strong opinions on many topics (notably on<br>programming languages), I am much less<br>emotionally invested in the ancient Editor<br>War. Indeed, even though<br>I sometimes defend Emacs mordicus, to be honest I do not know that<br>much about it and I have never tried<br>Vi/Vim (nor its<br>variations). So please consider this article<br>only as an approximate historical account of the reasons that led me<br>to choose Emacs, and not as an attempt at a debate.
I have absolutely nothing against other editors. Even though my<br>professional work involve maintaining editor support for the OCaml<br>language, and I have sometimes been frustrated by the difficulties<br>one can encounter when extending Visual Studio<br>Code, I do not hold any particular<br>hostility toward them. Similarly, although I try to favor free<br>software whenever possible, I am unfortunately not very familiar<br>with licensing issues, the various philosophies, or more generally<br>anything related to the GNU<br>world. My choice of Emacs is therefore not a political one, but a<br>pragmatic one, as we will try to show in this article.
My prehistory
Before telling the story of my encounter with Emacs, I will take a<br>brief detour through the completely stupid choices I made over the<br>years before I seriously started writing code. Indeed, when you begin<br>discovering programming as a self-taught developer, you can run into a<br>lot of difficulties and, in my case, from the very first seconds, I<br>was confronted with terminological problems.
Writing code with Microsoft Word
Like many people of my generation, I started seriously trying to<br>program with PHP. At the time, I did not have<br>regular access to an internet connection, so I learned mainly from<br>books, and, not having installation rights on my computer, I assumed<br>that what I was writing actually worked (true story). The book I<br>was using to try to understand PHP (whose title and edition I sadly no<br>longer remember) stated in its introduction that to write code, we<br>could use any text editor . Since I was very young and I was not<br>executing my code, I decided to use Microsoft<br>Word. And yes,<br>understanding the difference between a text editor and a rich text<br>editor was, at the time, too much for me.
EasyPHP, Notepad and Notepad++
After finally having the opportunity to run the code I was writing,<br>via a CD-ROM that provided an installer for<br>EasyPHP, I was able to naively understand<br>the difference between a text editor and a rich text editor and ...<br>I switched to<br>Notepad. At the<br>time, I did not really understand the code I was writing (and<br>copy-pasting), and I did not fully realize the importance of syntax<br>highlighting and indentation preservation.
Once I was able to run my PHP programs, I gradually became more<br>ambitious and eventually discovered my first code editor :<br>Notepad++. A true<br>epiphany.
It is quite amusing to realize that, when you have not been exposed<br>to a comfortable tool, you laboriously make do without it, while<br>imagining that you can live without it forever. I suppose this also<br>applies to programming languages. Without sum types, one tends to<br>think they are not particularly useful, until you actually use<br>them... in practice.
I used Notepad++ for a long time, with a few detours through<br>SciTE, then<br>Eclipse and<br>its PHP support (which, although offering more features, even in a<br>pré-LSP<br>era, gave me a lot of trouble, probably because I was not wired for<br>the tool).
Then I jumped on the Sublime<br>Text bandwagon, thinking<br>it would be the last code editor I would ever use in my life , as I<br>was so convinced by its ergonomics and aesthetics.
Le Site du Zéro: discovering alternatives
After having used PHP to do things, I started getting interested in<br>programming for programming’s sake , and I ended up on Le Site Du<br>Zéro. I had<br>been active on Le Site Du Zéro as a “PHP developer”, but I was not<br>particularly familiar with the forum (nor with forums in general).<br>One of the strengths of Le Site Du Zéro, in addition to some of its<br>tutorials, was its community (which was significantly reduced<br>when it transitioned...