Emacs

So, while I do love Debian, it does often show its age. It is very stable, and to remain stable it is often using older versions of software. When I decided to get back into Emacs for org-mode, I found it easier to use a more recent version than Debian provides. This turned out to be fairly simple.

git clone https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs.git
cd emacs
sudo apt install autoconf automake libtool texinfo libgccjit-12-dev libgtk-4-dev libxaw7-dev libgnutls28-dev libgif-dev ripgrep libncurses-dev makeinfo
git clone https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs.git
cd emacs
autoreconf -vi
./configure --prefix=$HOME/emacs --with-native-compilation
make -j8
make install

Optionally, if you want pgtk support:

So I recently got back into using Emacs, primarily as a productivity tool. While it might be more at some point, my best programming weapons are still VSCode and Vim, sometimes NeoVim, and usually in combination with TMux and the vim-tmux-navigator plugin. But I can always go into that later, or you can search for what is likely a better explanation elsewhere.

Emacs, originally short for “Editor Macros”, is quite well named. People come to Emacs looking for a direct comparison between VSCode and other solutions, which is foolish, as it turns out. The best explanation I heard was that Emacs is not an editor, it is a toolkit for building the perfect editor for you. But like a lot of things, there is some assembly required.