Things that made me come back to Emacs | cephei8's siteThings that made me come back to Emacs<br>18 Jul, 2026<br>TLDR: Neovim was good, I just personally like Emacs better (especially Org-Mode).<br>I think I can call my experiment to try out Neovim finished, and I am happy to be back to Emacs.<br>I used to be a GUI Emacs user.<br>The motivation to try out Neovim was the rise of AI agentic workflows, and that the AI agent harnesses worked best in the &ldquo;proper&rdquo; terminals (Claude Code was flickering and jumping around in Emacs&rsquo;s vterm, and it wasn&rsquo;t a good experience).<br>Thus, I had to move my terminal out of my editor and instead bring my editor into my terminal. Additionally, AI agent sessions are often long-living, so tmux became a requirement (not saying that I couldn&rsquo;t have tmux in my Emacs&rsquo;s vterm, probably I could, it was just another reason to shift from GUI Emacs to a terminal-based workflows).<br>After moving to terminal+tmux, I tried out TUI Emacs, but some shortcuts weren&rsquo;t working (SHIFT-* or OPT-* sequences weren&rsquo;t propagated properly or something like that, I don&rsquo;t remember), I had to remap some stuff, and out of curiosity I decided to try out Neovim.<br>Neovim was good, most of what I did in Emacs I could do in Neovim, and the plugins mostly gave me experience I wanted (e.g. Neogit vs Magit, oil.nvim vs Dired).<br>It&rsquo;s just that I had everything working better for me in Emacs.<br>Particularly, I missed:<br>Org-Mode (publishing, Ox-Hugo, Org-Roam)<br>Dired<br>Embark<br>Magit<br>So,<br>now I use TUI Emacs mostly (in terminal+tmux)<br>Emacs also got ghostel now, which gives me pretty good experience when I use GUI Emacs with embedded terminal (maybe also AI agent harness improved to run smoother)