Day 3 – Doom, Vim, and the Eternal Return

Default Emacs keybindings are ancient. I’m pretty sure they were designed back when dinosaurs still roamed MIT’s hallways. Efficient? Not really. Finger-twisting? Absolutely. Setting everything up from scratch when you barely know what’s going on feels like trying to build a spaceship out of IKEA parts, but without the manual.

Yesterday, I tried Doom Emacs, a preconfigured flavor of Emacs with plenty of nice quality-of-life improvements. Today, after somehow breaking every setting beyond repair, I decided to nuke Doom and regular Emacs alike. Sometimes you just have to wipe the slate clean… or, in my case, the entire hard drive of my sanity.

As if learning Arch Linux and Emacs weren’t enough, I also decided to learn Vim, so I could use Doom’s evil mode. The irony is not lost on me: I’m willingly entering evil mode. But I genuinely prefer Vim keybindings for editing text, they’re oddly satisfying once you stop crying over :q!.

My Vim knowledge going in? Minimal. I knew hjkl moved the cursor, :q quits, :w saves, :wq saves and quits, and i toggles insert mode, while ESC goes out of it. That’s it. Basically baby’s first Vim.

So most of my day went into learning Vim basics and exploring the whole Org-mode ecosystem, which I can already tell is a rabbit hole that never ends.

To relax, I decided to test gaming on Linux. I played Stick It To The Stickman on Steam because it’s small, chaotic, and already performs badly on Windows, so I figured it’d be a fair test. It launched perfectly, no tweaking needed. Even better, it ran smoother than on Windows. Unity games apparently love Linux now. Who knew?

Day 4 – The Great Bracket Massacre

I nuked Emacs again. My configs turned into an undecipherable mess. ELISP is interesting, but the sheer number of parentheses makes me dizzy. There’s a classic joke: Hackers once stole a top-secret codebase written entirely in Lisp. Fortunately, they only got away with the last 1000 lines of all closing parentheses.

So I decided to ditch Doom Emacs for now and try building a custom Emacs setup from scratch. Instead of spending weeks learning Doom’s magic, I’ll make my own magic. Or at least summon a friendly error message.

This time, I brought in a secret weapon: Codex, my AI assistant, to help generate Emacs configs. Don’t get me wrong, customizing Emacs manually is noble and all, but I’d like a working setup this decade.

Then I discovered something truly wild: you can configure Emacs using Org-mode. Basically, you write your entire config in an .org file, mixing documentation and code in one place. When you save it, it automatically exports the actual config file. It’s beautiful. It’s cursed. And it makes me wonder what an entire codebase written this way would look like. Probably like a Lovecraftian text adventure. It is possible to use it for any config file or programming language.

Day 5 – The Doom Strikes Back

Today I continued working on my custom Emacs setup. It went… badly. I didn’t keep a Git repo, so when things broke beyond repair, I had nothing to roll back to. In the end, I had no choice but to nuke everything again. At this point, I’m starting to think “nuke and start over” should be in my daily cron job.

This time, I crawled back to Doom Emacs, tail between my parentheses. The silver lining? I finally understand a lot more of what’s happening under the hood. The dark cloud? I’ve spent multiple full days on this and have nothing to show for it except muscle memory for rm -rf.

Still, I’m trying to stay optimistic. All this setup pain will pay off later, I tell myself. Probably. Hopefully. Maybe.

I’ve also started laying the foundations for my Org-roam brain, moving my scattered notes into Org-journal. Slowly but surely, my chaos of text files is turning into something structured, something almost resembling knowledge. If nothing else, I’ve definitely mastered the art of starting from scratch.