GoKawiilI have been using (badly) Emacs since around 2008. In this short article, I will try to present the chaotic path that led me to choose Emacs as my main text and code editor. This is absolutely not a tutorial , but rather a small piece of my personal lore, because it is quite amusing to describe clumsy choices that, in hindsight, turned out to be, in my view, beneficial. This article is largely inspired , while being less ambitious, by the April 2026 topic of the Emacs Carnival .
While I can have very strong opinions on many topics (notably on programming languages), I am much less emotionally invested in the ancient Editor War. Indeed, even though I sometimes defend Emacs mordicus, to be honest I do not know that much about it and I have never tried Vi/Vim (nor its variations). So please consider this article only as an approximate historical account of the reasons that led me to choose Emacs, and not as an attempt at a debate.
I have absolutely nothing against other editors. Even though my professional work involve maintaining editor support for the OCaml language, and I have sometimes been frustrated by the difficulties one can encounter when extending Visual Studio Code, I do not hold any particular hostility toward them. Similarly, although I try to favor free software whenever possible, I am unfortunately not very familiar with licensing issues, the various philosophies, or more generally anything related to the GNU world. My choice of Emacs is therefore not a political one, but a pragmatic one, as we will try to show in this article.
My prehistory
Before telling the story of my encounter with Emacs, I will take a brief detour through the completely stupid choices I made over the years before I seriously started writing code. Indeed, when you begin discovering programming as a self-taught developer, you can run into a lot of difficulties and, in my case, from the very first seconds, I was confronted with terminological problems.
Writing code with Microsoft Word
Like many people of my generation, I started seriously trying to program with PHP. At the time, I did not have regular access to an internet connection, so I learned mainly from books, and, not having installation rights on my computer, I assumed that what I was writing actually worked (true story). The book I was using to try to understand PHP (whose title and edition I sadly no longer remember) stated in its introduction that to write code, we could use any text editor. Since I was very young and I was not executing my code, I decided to use Microsoft Word. And yes, understanding the difference between a text editor and a rich text editor was, at the time, too much for me.
EasyPHP, Notepad and Notepad++
After finally having the opportunity to run the code I was writing, via a CD-ROM that provided an installer for EasyPHP, I was able to naively understand the difference between a text editor and a rich text editor and ... I switched to Notepad. At the time, I did not really understand the code I was writing (and copy-pasting), and I did not fully realize the importance of syntax highlighting and indentation preservation.
Once I was able to run my PHP programs, I gradually became more ambitious and eventually discovered my first code editor: Notepad++. A true epiphany.
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