22 years of Emacs

Sorry if already posted, did not come up using the search. Interesting read... I for one, I'm too on the 22 year mark of using Emacs.

I started using it in my first uni year, 2000. It was the editor presented to first year students, at the time.

I started using it in '88.

I started in '98, so it'll be 25 next year.

I started in '99, but it wasn't till I pilfered my tech leads Emacs configuration the next year that I was really inducted into the order.

what kind of tasks / environment ?

I think we had emacs/xemacs in mine but same year 2000. Emacs tab indentation felt smarter than anything I've seen (including visual studio), it was a reliable thinking aid (if the indenter goes bad, you forgot something) rather than just a visual looking step.

Wild to think people have been using emacs as long as I've lived

Probably the best effort vs. benefit learning investment 20 years later.

'94 here, when I started using Linux emacs and vi were goto tools each (at the time I preferred vi because the systems I used were underpowered and emacs also had issues over dialup modem lines (term) out of the box at the time. I also swapped on and off over the years between heavy weight IDEs (Java programming really sucked in emacs in the old days), but I was always using emacs for non Java programming since the early 2000s. I have to say in the last 4-6 years it's become a total environment for me and I feel like it would be really difficult to replace with anything else now. It is that total ability to openly become the editor mechanic (like cars before onboard computers were around).

Started using emacs in 2022 :)

Discovering syntax highlighting and automatic tab indentation, blew my mind! And then I discovered it could be customized and extended using this weird language, LISP, and it took off from there!

smie ?

I feel old, Emacs snuck up on me disguised as \[Perfect Writer\]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect\_Writer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Writer)) on a Basis-108 running CPM around 1984/5. I learned c-x c-s and not being able to understand the value of modal editing (sorry vi) , installed emacs on the PDP-11 that I had to use for a summer job. The rest as they say is history. Many, many years later as my career moved away from programming (C, C++, java, python) into managing, Carsten created org-mode and emacs became a place to track all things. org-roam then leverage emacs to become a place to organize thoughts and ideas. I sheepishly admit that I have recently started to use evil - even old dogs can try to learn some new tricks.