Emacs, how it all started (for me)

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.

It is quite amusing to realize that, when you have not been exposed to a comfortable tool, you laboriously make do without it, while imagining that you can live without it forever. I suppose this also applies to programming languages. Without sum types, one tends to think they are not particularly useful, until you actually use them... in practice.

I used Notepad++ for a long time, with a few detours through SciTE, then Eclipse and its PHP support (which, although offering more features, even in a pré-LSP era, gave me a lot of trouble, probably because I was not wired for the tool).

Then I jumped on the Sublime Text bandwagon, thinking it would be the last code editor I would ever use in my life, as I was so convinced by its ergonomics and aesthetics.

Le Site du Zéro: discovering alternatives

After having used PHP to do things, I started getting interested in programming for programming’s sake, and I ended up on Le Site Du Zéro. I had been active on Le Site Du Zéro as a “PHP developer”, but I was not particularly familiar with the forum (nor with forums in general). One of the strengths of Le Site Du Zéro, in addition to some of its tutorials, was its community (which was significantly reduced when it transitioned into OpenClassrooms).

Indeed, on this very active forum, there was a collection of users passionate about programming, using languages very different from those I had been exposed to! By browsing the various forum topics, I discovered names of languages such as OCaml, Erlang, Forth, Haskell, Io, Smalltalk, various Lisp dialects, and many others, more or less obscure.

In 2026, this list is probably underwhelming, as these languages have become popular. But at the time, when I only knew PHP, I was very poorly educated about the vast diversity of programming languages.

It is quite amusing to see that, more than 15 years later, this initial curiosity has led me to work professionally with less popular languages such as Erlang and OCaml, and that I have had the opportunity (and the honor) to collaborate with users so far ahead of my own knowledge that they implicitly introduced me to these alternative languages.

It was very motivating to discover these other languages, however I was quite frustrated to realize that I did not understand anything. I therefore decided to learn as many languages as possible, hoping that this would help me improve my PHP skills and, above all, choose the ideal language depending on the problems at hand, while trying to avoid falling into the Law of the Instrument, a trap I only fell into much later, because now, in the projects I work on every day, I have come to the conclusion that OCaml is always the right answer, hehehe.

Experimenting with as many programming languages as possible

I was very, very motivated and I went to the List of programming languages page with a simple goal: for each language, try to find a compiler or an interpreter, and attempt to write a Brainfuck interpreter!

I naturally allowed myself the freedom to skip some languages if they seemed too far from any realistic, practical use case (attempting to write a Brainfuck interpreter in HAL/S, for instance, felt very ambitious).

Emacs to the rescue ... on Windows

At the time, I was heavily using software from the Adobe Creative Suite as well as Windows, and I did not realize how limiting this was for learning to program. This made my search for installable compilers and interpreters significantly more difficult. In addition, having grown used to syntax highlighting and indentation preservation, I also wanted a decent editor setup.

One mode per problem and excellent Windows support

It turns out that, at the time, before editor interaction standardization protocols such as LSP (or TreeSitter) had really matured, I had the impression that Emacs was the standard. Indeed, even for languages that seemed obscure to me, I could almost always find a corresponding Emacs mode! Moreover, surprisingly enough, Emacs’ Windows support was (and very likely still is) excellent.

The only concrete difficulty I faced at the time was that, as a beginner Windows user, I had no idea what my $PATH was, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out "how and where to configure Emacs".

After dozens of experiments, Windows started to feel too limiting, so I moved to a Linux distribution, first through virtualization, then via dual-boot, until in 2014 I deleted my Windows partition and went from a bad Windows user to a bad Linux user.

Conclusion

It is quite amusing that I ended up using one of the earliest free software programs on a proprietary operating system, only to eventually decide to migrate permanently to something more free. I continued using Emacs as my main editor over the years, gradually trying to learn how to use it more effectively. This learning phase is still ongoing, even though I now maintain my own package, have learned to build a somewhat overly generic configuration, and avidly read various Emacs-related feeds.

I have sometimes had to take detours through other editors, such as IntelliJ (JVM reasons) and Visual Studio (#NET reasons), and I have occasionally experimented with alternatives. However, time and habits had already taken root, and I always inevitably come back to Emacs (muscle memory and Bastien often helped bring me back to reason). Years later, I do not regret this choice at all, made for ad hoc and chaotic reasons. I am an Emacs user!

This was a slightly longer article than expected, with many detours and not much useful information. If you made it this far, thank you!