Emacs is a wonderful piece of software. It鈥檚 easily my favourite program of all time. It can also be a little overwhelming to configure for the first time. One of the many things that make Emacs great, though, is its dedicated and helpful user base. I hope to add a small contribution to that community with this post, going over what I would have told my past self as I was just starting out using Emacs and trying to write my first Emacs configuration file....
In my opinion, the power of Emacs is that you鈥檙e able to program your own working environment. Other editors may be just as, or possibly more, efficient to use, but I haven鈥檛 come across any that give you control over as many aspects of your editor as Emacs does. Customising and tweaking your configuration may be an endless endeavour, but it鈥檚 also a highly rewarding one. All that being said, I was inspired to tweak the look of my Org Mode setup, especially after reading the blog post Beautifying Org Mode in Emacs....
This website is built with Hugo and ox-hugo, an exporting engine that lets me write my posts in Org mode and then put it online easily. Org mode is a really clever and powerful plain text format that works great for note taking, text editing, and TODO lists/agendas. Moreover, there are a lot of convenient features for us Emacs users when using ox-hugo to write our blogs (besides staying in the comfort of a well-known format and editing flow)....