Is anyone still using Emacs? - Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)<br>Is anyone still using Emacs?<br>June 19, 2026 ·<br>About 7 minutes<br>Tags:<br>blogsystem5, emacs, essay, workflow<br>This article was<br>originally published<br>on Substack<br>in the Blog System/5 newsletter<br>and is replicated here for archival purposes.

In a recent discussion at the orange site sparked by the Emacs 31 Is Around the Corner: The Changes I&rsquo;m Already Daily Driving article, people were asking themselves &ldquo;Is anyone still using Emacs?&rdquo; and then providing their own perspective.<br>For me, the answer is a resounding yes&mldr; but the interesting part is that I&rsquo;m not still using Emacs: I&rsquo;m actually using Emacs again. And instead of burying my answer to the opening question in a long discussion thread, I thought I&rsquo;d explain my journey with and without Emacs for the last&mldr; almost 30 years. At the end, I&rsquo;ll unveil the specific feature that I feel gives me superpowers and that keeps me hooked.<br>From DOS and Windows to Linux<br>I got into Linux around 1997 via Caldera OpenLinux 1.1. Before then, I had extensively played with Borland Turbo C++ and Visual Basic as a kid so I was heavily accustomed to those fancy IDEs that we lost.<br>As I got into Linux and found myself in an alien world, I had to buy a couple of introductory books. Yes, books, the printed kind—because that&rsquo;s how we had to learn new stuff before. Both books talked about Vim and Emacs and presented them as the advanced choices. I found this strange because the IDEs I had used before seemed more complete, but I, being a Windows renegade for some reason, charged ahead. I learned the basics of both editors and went through their tutorials at different times.<br>The two old books I used to learn Linux back in the day, open to show their Vim and Emacs introductions.Since then and until roughly 2015, I flip-flopped between Vim and Emacs. At times I used one, and at times I used the other. I favored Emacs for long-running coding sessions but Vim excelled at my pkgsrc work where I had to edit tens of different files in quick succession.<br>The switch to VSCode and IntelliJ<br>Even though Vim and Emacs worked well for me, I missed something. Language integration was poor so I was tempted by the more modern editors that everyone was touting, and especially so as I moved to macOS. I tried a bunch, like the now-defunct Atom and Brackets, but they all felt brittle and overwhelming: they had too many features, too many settings.<br>And then, VSCode arrived in 2015. As I took it for a test drive, it &ldquo;felt right&rdquo; from the get-go. It looked modern, was relatively small, and its plain and simple settings editor—read: just a JSON file because there were no settings panels yet!—made me feel like I was in control. I could understand this modern editor and easily tune it to my needs.<br>Soon after, I started learning Go and then Rust, and VSCode&rsquo;s integration with their corresponding LSPs made that process so much easier: code auto-completion and real-time error highlighting sped up my learning significantly. I stuck with VSCode for these languages and slowly phased Emacs out. I was sold.<br>During that time period, I was also working on Bazel—a Java project—at Google and the natural choice for it was IntelliJ. I had tried to use Emacs for Java development at some point, but IntelliJ was (and still is) so good that it was the only realistic choice.<br>My usage of VSCode with its Vim plugin continued through my short stint at Microsoft, where I was working on a C++ codebase and had to connect to remote Windows boxes. Most people used RDP to work on the remote machine &ldquo;directly&rdquo;, but I couldn&rsquo;t stand that workflow: I very much preferred running VSCode on my desktop and using SSH to connect to the remote machine, which is something that VSCode does very well.<br>Back to (Doom) Emacs<br>And then&mldr; I moved to Snowflake in 2022 where development used to happen inside an ancient Linux VM and where my day-to-day job was to write shell scripts and Bazel build files: neither VSCode nor IntelliJ were going to save me here, and as I mentioned earlier, I hate the feeling of working within the constraints of a &ldquo;remote&rdquo; graphical environment. So my instinct was to go back to SSH and connect to the local VM with it.<br>As I did that, I needed an editor for long work sessions, and the old and trusty Emacs was there waiting for me. But this time around, I didn&rsquo;t have the patience to set it up. You see: I had accumulated hundreds of lines in my init.el file over the years without understanding much about them, and I wanted to throw it all away and start over&mldr; but it all felt like too much work. Maybe destiny brought Doom Emacs my way at the right time.<br>Stock Doom Emacs screenshot from the project's website.You see, Doom Emacs is an Emacs &ldquo;distribution&rdquo; where someone has gone through the pain (or joy, I won&rsquo;t judge) of configuring Emacs from the ground up....