My Emacs Zero to IDE Journey

Details

External ID

49420055

Source

HN

Company

—

Product

My Emacs Zero to IDE Journey

Website domain

github.com

Launched

Aug. 24, 2026

Cohort

—

Upvotes

15

Upvotes percentile

0.6975806451612904

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Fetched at

Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.

Updated at

Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.

Description

I recently encountered a situation where JetBrains IDEs weren't working for a project, and I wasn't even sure I wanted to keep paying the yearly fee.I decided to de-IDE myself and as part of it I decided to look at my options. The more I saw of Emacs the more interested I got. However using the Doom emacs distribution kind of threw me in the deep end without actually understanding how Emacs operates. I was lost and bounced off quick.I decided to take the approach of starting with vanilla Emacs and trying to get it to work for me as an IDE one step at a time. This post was me documenting that and actually trying to understand each component or feature I was trying to utilize.I figured I would post it here in case someone else is interested and wants to try and break through the Emacs wall.

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