Taking on Emacs

After toying with Haskell for a few days and really like the challenge (but mostly failing). I liked rediscovering this control over my computer experience. Please note, I'm saying rediscovered here and not saying that I couldn't do this with my existing knowledge of things like python or c, just simply me re-recongizing it was possible. Which then led me down the rabbit hole of how I interact with content and ultimately, what tools I use to do all of this.

One of the core take aways was how I interact with content:

1. I consume it, by reading or taking action on it
2. I take action on it, using math, or cutting and pasting
3. I format it, converting to PDF, exporting to the web

But when I interact with content in the form of a Microsoft Word Document, I need to juggle each of these aspects at the same time. It seemed to slow me know or side-track me on my goals and objectives, because I was fighting with one of the interactions of content that didn't matter more than the interaction that did.

Which led to me looking for new tools, in this case a haskell editor for literate programming. Emacs kept popping up which I rejected in the past. Then I kept seeing other trends in similar software and tools I was using (especially VS Code). Which led to me creating a personally specification that ultimately pointed to:

1. Learn Emacs
2. Use a plethora of open source solutions and custom write scripts that does the automation between them

Emacs won out, while it will take a while to become comfortable with it, I reached out to my local mastadon instance fosstodon to ask about resources besides the default manual, to which I was directed to masteringemacs.org that had some articles that helped drive home some confusing points with simple commands under those headings.

• Start publishing with org-mode and org files instead of the markdown files, I might need to use pandoc to covert to markdown from org at first
• Finish my personal emacs cheat sheet

• Convert my intial haskell learnings to the literate programming with org-mode and babel?

  main :: IO()
  main = putStrLn "Hello, World!"
  

  prints, org-babel-execute-src-block: No org-babel-execute function for haskell! and when editing I get, org-edit-src-code: No such language mode: haskell-mode

• Restart my haskell learnings and blogging

I can now use emacs for other life management, like todos, projects, calendar sync, emails, programming. I liked the idea of obsidian and notion but found that with some masterying over those aspects in emacs you can have the same or more powerful functionality while owning the underlying code AND your data. With emacs server, TRAMP, and git I can take this functionality pretty much anywhere. Including my windblows computers that I keep around for offensive tool development and my other one for TTRPG gaming.