I rage-quit Emacs this morning. By that, I don’t mean that I hit C-x C-c really hard, although I did do that. I mean I stopped using Emacs.
I have spent so much time this past week futzing with my Emacs config. And then futzing with my note-taking process in Emacs. And then reading articles about how other people futz with these things. It occurred to me that I’ve not done much of anything else. So I quit.
Emacs is worse for me than other software because it’s too damn good at too many things. This sounds like a stupid reason to stop using Emacs, and it kind of is, but I need a break from living neck-deep in it. I need a change in venue.
What usually happens is that after a couple of weeks (sometimes days), I miss it. I miss that it does nearly everything and what it doesn’t do I can make it do, with just a few days of venturing down various rabbit holes. It’s those rabbit holes that get me. I’m trying to avoid that right now. And around it goes.
So, for now, I’ll edit text in BBEdit or (gasp!) Vim (an excuse to try the new v9). I’ll keep tasks in Things. I’ll write notes in TheBrain. Everything else I’ll just stop doing, I guess.
“But did you really quit?” you ask. I know, we’ve been here many times before. But yes, for the moment, I’m going to take a break from Emacs (and :sniff: Org-mode). I have to quit cold turkey or I just keep going back. Let’s see how long it lasts this time.
Update July 06, 2022: It lasted almost a week.
https://xkcd.com/378/
Ha! If only I’d known about C-x M-c M-Butterfly! 🙂
Me too… and over the last couple of days as well. In fact over the last couple of years or so I seem to have swapped in and out of Emacs at roughly the same frequency as you, and for much the same reasons.
This time it was because I wanted to get back to using DEVONthink more, and that works more smoothly with markdown (I can use it to store Org files, but there’s more friction and you lose some functionality), but using markdown mode in Emacs always seems a waste when you’ve got Org mode to hand, and I’m getting bored with configuring things, and I only use a todo list because I want to play with Org rather than actually needing one, and so on, and on… Last time it was Tinderbox releasing a new version…
This time I’m going to stick strictly to DT3 and iA Writer and Reminders.
I give it about a month…
Your story sounds very familiar! :). I would prefer that we lived in a world in which Org-mode was the defacto markup standard. It’s difficult to ignore how well Markdown integrates with just about everything these days. And you’re right, editing Markdown in Emacs is hard because Org-mode is right there. Good luck with your new setup. Let me know if it lasts. I’ll do the same 🙂