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Breno Farias Fonseca
Breno Farias Fonseca

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Why I Still Use Emacs in 2025

  • It’s Genuinely Fun: Where else can you check the lunar phases (M-x lunar-phases) or talk to a built-in psychotherapist emulator (M-x doctor)?
  • Is the opposite of minimalism: I can do everything from one place — reading emails, coding, creating documentation, and reviewing PRs — with consistent keybindings for all of it
  • Modular Unix philosophy? Forget it! (not even the ls command follows this philosophy)
  • It has a built-in pomodoro timer 😂
  • Amazing PDF Integration: Thanks to pdf-tools, I can read PDFs, make annotations, highlight text, and navigate through my notes without ever leaving the editor
  • Seamless Context Switching: Jumping from a Next.js project to a Scala project is straightforward and incredibly fast
  • The editor adapts to my workflow, not the other way around
  • Org Mode: This is my second brain. I use it to organize notes, create documents with images, links, and tables, and export them to dozens of formats. Think of Markdown on steroids. I think this is where Emacs shines
  • Magit: A text-based user interface for Git that is simply amazing. It makes version control faster and more intuitive than any GUI I’ve used
  • The Perfect Theme: It has the best light theme I’ve ever used: https://github.com/fniessen/emacs-leuven-theme

“Why not just use VS Code?” Don’t get me wrong, VS Code is a fantastic tool. But for me, it all comes down to muscle memory. After many years of using Emacs, it just works. When I open Emacs, the keyboard feels like an extension of my thoughts. When I open another editor, it feels like I’ve forgotten how to type.

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