It’s tempting to stop using Emacs. Not that it’s not good, it’s just GUIs look so slick sometimes. Being able to just click a button to compile, or having tables and graphs of my finances, even just having a GUI for email and calendars sometimes feels nice. Thus, I am tempted to download Thunderbird, Kate (or VSCode), and KMyMoney and do things that way. I do it because I’m weak. I want to fit in. I want all the conveniences, to do it all and be normal (or at least something approaching normal).

But I always find myself back in Emacs. Kate, good as it is, struggles with doing things like piping text through external commands. It doesn’t support Fossil SCM. It forgets build settings, despite the Makefile being right there. Or VSCode needing yet another extension to do simple crap like line wrapping (i.e.: fill-paragraph) and basic text manipulation. Thunderbird doesn’t even want to play nice with the GPG installed on my system, where I already have a keypair made and ready to use, it acts like it has to do it, otherwise I’ll just screw it up. The OWL extension for Thunderbird makes great strides in Exchange support, but mostly it just gets all janky and pops up errors or takes forever to do a thing.

No, Emacs (especially Emacs in the terminal, as I use it) is not ✨ AmAzInG ✨. Getting emoji requires opening another app and copy/pasting it. Packages are very hit or miss. Sure they’ll work forever in some limited capacity, but sometimes they’re just bad. Plus, it feels like my config is a big book of glue code holding things together into a shape of an editor. But it’s my glue and my editor. I made it into what I need it to be. Sure, that means I have to deal with janky ass looking emails, no desktop notifications for calendar appointments and other weird-ass-shit that doesn’t always line up, but for the most part, it works. It’ll work long after I’m gone, as it did long before I even was a person. And that’s something.