I’m 22, going into masters in CS.
I’ve been using obsidian for pkm business, and a jetbrains IDE for coding.
Put yourself in my shoes! If you were in my scenario (young, cs, age of AI upcoming), what would you do…
Really looking forward to these answers and ideas, thank you so much!!!
I think the most important thing is the purpose of using a tool, what benefits you expect to gain from it, and what costs you’re willing to endure.
The benefit of using Emacs is that everything is customizable, but the cost is that you’ll spend a great deal of time on it, to the point where you might never want to switch to another tool afterward.
You should list a more detailed table to clarify your goals, needs, and the price you’re willing to pay. Then ask others for their opinions—generally speaking, the more clearly and completely you express your purpose, the more others can help you.
But right now, I can’t understand your true needs from such vague phrasing.
Can you see yourself to build workflows with Emacs?
I mean stuff like using org-mode to layout the outlines of a essays, add tables with org-table, org-babel to add literal programming to the data, org-export to export the result to PDF though Latex and Magit to version your changes.
I’m deep enough in Emacs that I don’t want to use anything else as my config provides a continuity and with it muscle memory in usage that makes usage a joy. I do use some other tools at times and I feel like it’s a chore so I try to do this only for work, where I can’t justify the time I would spend adapting Emacs to the task.
If this speaks to you, give it a try.
I started to use Emacs when I was an undergraduate. It went the way that @yibie and @dgr have laid out before. Just that Git and PDF viewing in Emacs hadn’t been invented, yet.
I got fed up by spending time with Emacs instead of using it for something meaningful and went through, what I call, a minimalistic phase. So much so that after Vim, I used ed for text editing and programming. This taught me valuable lessons about human-computer-interaction and semantic editing vs. spatial editing.
Via Spacemacs I arrived at doom Emacs with Vim keybindings today and I still use ed for one-off file editing.
For me, the killer applications are Magit and Org-mode. Org mode allows you to use hypertext in ways impossible elsewhere and has become the backbone of my professional social data management. One of the most used features is linking to e-mail (served in Gnus) from org files.
For me, Emacs really is a generalised human-computer interface that allows me to access and link text through a common input system. If it had a decent browser, I would never leave it. One pinnacle on this journey was using Emacs as my graphical desktop environment via EXWM. I just left it because of switching to Wayland and because Emacs is inherently single-threaded (which is a bad fit in this case). What it gave me, though, was that I could use emacs key bindings to manage text input and windows, and I still sorely miss that.