I started using emacs when I got into colege, around 2003. Emacs, at that time, was this weird program that once I got in I couldn’t get out (hadn’t learned to do C-x C-c yet). Over the course of next 10 years we have grown to know one anther. With each project I’ve changed my emacs to its particular needs and learned its shortcuts to improve my efficiency. After nearly 10 years both me and it got accustomed to one another.
However after 10 years things aren’t perfect. For instance, my emacs caugt some kind of Alzheimer when working with either HTML or XML, reverting always to sgml-mode. I’ve narrowed down what is making it act like that to somewhere in the middle of my Rails configuration. The odd part is that I’ve never written anything of consequence with Rails and should be able to remove it. However, if I do that, keybindings that I’m accustomed to stop working and the behavior of my emacs changes.
I’ve tried it to rewrite it at least two times, but the end result never ends with the same behavior, like some Frankenstein version of my old Emacs.
So I’ve come to this point where my Emacs gained this “personality”, but if I try to change it, or remove its bad parts, the “personality” changes and I no longer recognize it. In some sense, is like the Phineas Gage case.
I couldn’t continue working like that, with an editor doesn’t want to change. So I’ve sought refuge in Text Mate, and Sublime Text 2. But they are not the same thing. They are very decent editors, but they don’t know me like emacs would. There is always something missing, like a quad buffer window split, but I don’t know if I can handle another midwork crisis, where emacs, as a spoiled brat, “forgets” cua-mode, doesn’t let me reactivate it and reverts back to the yank and killing system until I’ve restarted the app.
For the third time I’m gonna try to rewrite my .emacs. If it doesn’t change, that’s it, I’m leaving it for good. You can follow it here (https://github.com/nurv/dotemacs)