As a long-time vim user I always fantasized about having one place to do
all my usual computing, note taking, email and task management. So
naturally I have always been intrigued by Emacs and its capabilities:
Org, the possibility of configuring my editor with an actual - and sane - (programming) language - opposed to the abomination that is Vim script - the community, the trillions of packages, just to name a few.
The things that always held me back were the completely different key
bindings, the necessity of learning Lisp at some point and the time of
not being productive while learning and researching all of the
aforementioned things, but the biggest concern - the new keybinding -
got completely blown off when I learned about evil-mode, which is kind
of an emulation layer, giving one the possibility to use vim keybindings
inside Emacs.
This made the transition from Vim to Emacs a lot less daunting to me. I could just use Emacs, kind of, like the way I used Vim and could learn and customize Emacs along the way. 'Perfect', I thought to myself, 'so now there is actually nothing holding me back anymore!' Well, there was nothing, except my ADHD kicking in.
I spent countless days reading about a million things I thought of being
super nice having in my config. I over-engineered the smallest things,
browsed through init.el after init.el on GitHub and always found a
new package I wanted to try. Suffice to say, I never really got stuff
done, being too busy configuring Emacs and planning how to be more
productive with this package and supposedly making my workflow
easier with that package - without ever really learning Emacs.
So I had to come up with something, as always, to contain my ADHD - this is the case especially when trying to learn something new and shiny. After countless hours evaluating this idea and that procedure (you see the pattern here, right?), in the end I came up with the idea of starting this project - Learn Emacs the ADHD way - which is just a collection of rules I will lay onto myself to truly learn Emacs. Plus, me publicizing this hopefully makes me go through with this, regarding my never-ending love for attention.
- I will force myself to go step-by-step, loosely following the Emacs documentation
- At first I will install no* other package and evaluate every built-in functionality if it is enough for my use-case
- I will not configure any other part of Emacs, may it be cosmetically or functionally
- I will only research a part of Emacs when it is genuinely relevant to my workflow or when I am veritably encountering a problem or use case where the builtin feature is limiting me
- I will time-constrain myself while researching and configuring; see below
To hinder me of getting carried away - like so often - I will follow a strict rule: When I am researching something about Emacs, or some package I want to install, I will use the Pomodoro technique to monitor myself.
After finishing four "pomodoros" I will stop searching and use the best solution I have found up until the very moment the timer ends. If I still have the urge to look up that one tiny last thing (of course) I can do so in one of the breaks, but apart from that I will just go on with my life.
Other than learning Emacs, I hope to learn coping with my ADHD and possibly encourage others - with or without the condition - to try this way of gradual and controlled learning. And, of course, I am hoping to spur some kind of discussion about learning, working and living with ADHD and all its aspects.
A small note about the format of this documentation: I will eventually write and structure all this inside an Org file, but to actually stay on track and not go down the first rabbit hole before really having started I am initially writing all this in a plain markdown file.