Hello there, this is Mark from Minimalist Living. Today, I want to take you on a journey through what might seem like a contradiction at first glance—the world of text editors and true minimalism. As we all know, minimalism isn’t just about owning fewer things; it’s about intentionality, purpose, and eliminating the unnecessary. And nowhere is this philosophy more misunderstood than in the digital realm of text editing.
I’ve observed a troubling trend among those who claim to embrace minimalism while simultaneously bloating their digital tools beyond recognition. Today, we’re going to explore this phenomenon through the lens of what many consider the most minimalist editor of all: Emacs. But more importantly, we’ll discuss why your Emacs probably isn’t minimalist at all.
The Emacs Paradox: Minimal by Design, Maximal in Practice
Emacs, in its purest form, represents the pinnacle of minimalist software design. Created in the 1970s, it embodies a certain philosophy of extensibility and self-documentation. The core of Emacs is essentially a Lisp interpreter with text-editing capabilities—simple, elegant, and powerful.
While many argue that Emacs contradicts the Unix philosophy of “do one thing and do it well” (being more like an operating system than a text editor), there’s a certain minimalism in its approach. The base system provides just enough to be useful, with the understanding that users will build upon it as needed.
But what have we done to this initially streamlined creation? We’ve stuffed it full of plugins, extensions, and customizations until it barely resembles its original form. We’ve turned a tool designed for thoughtful extension into a bloated, slow-loading monstrosity that contradicts everything minimalism stands for.
I’ve seen Emacs configurations that span thousands of lines of code. Thousands! That’s more code than some entire applications. The irony is palpable—using a tool designed for personal customization in the most excessive way possible.
Many users proudly showcase their Emacs setups, with custom themes, dashboard plugins, file explorers, git integrations, and countless other additions that transform Emacs into something that looks more like a modern IDE. They claim it makes them more productive, more efficient. But does it really? Or are we just addicted to the constant tweaking, the endless optimization that never quite reaches its goal?
Learn Emacs, Not Emacs Customization
One of the most troubling aspects of modern Emacs usage is the proliferation of preconfigured distributions like Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, and Prelude. These distributions promise to make Emacs more accessible, more modern, and more user-friendly. But they come with a significant cost: they teach users how to use a highly customized version of Emacs, not Emacs itself.
If you were to drop a dedicated Doom Emacs user into vanilla Emacs, they would likely be completely lost. They wouldn’t know how to open files, switch buffers, or perform even the most basic operations without their familiar keybindings and commands. In essence, they haven’t been learning Emacs at all—they’ve been learning Doom Emacs, which is an entirely different beast.
This is the equivalent of learning to drive in a car where all the pedals have been rearranged, the steering wheel replaced with a joystick, and the dashboard completely redesigned. Yes, you’re technically “driving,” but the skills you’re developing won’t transfer to standard vehicles.
The truly minimalist approach is to learn Emacs as it was designed to be used. Learn the built-in keybindings. Understand the terminology of buffers, frames, and windows. Become familiar with the help system and how to discover commands on your own. These skills form the foundation of effective Emacs usage and will serve you regardless of what customizations you might add later.
By starting with a preconfigured distribution, you’re building on a foundation of sand. You’re learning shortcuts without understanding what they’re shortcuts for. You’re memorizing keybindings without comprehending the commands they invoke. When something breaks or behaves unexpectedly, you won’t have the knowledge to fix it because you never learned how Emacs actually works.
The Evil-mode Conundrum: A Minimalist Sin
Perhaps the most egregious example of this contradiction is evil-mode. For those unfamiliar, evil-mode implements Vim keybindings within Emacs. Yes, you read that correctly—people are using Emacs while making it behave like an entirely different editor.
Saint IGNUcius himself (the alter ego of Richard Stallman, Emacs’ creator) would surely call this a sin—it’s even in the name: EVIL-mode! The irony couldn’t be more obvious if it tried.
If you prefer Vim’s modal editing and movement commands, there’s a perfectly good solution: use Vim! Or better yet, use Neovim, which offers many modern features while maintaining Vim’s minimalist approach. By using evil-mode, you’re essentially creating a Frankenstein’s monster of text editors, combining two different philosophies into something that serves neither particularly well.
This approach fundamentally misunderstands minimalism. True minimalism isn’t about cramming every possible feature into one tool; it’s about choosing the right tool for the job and embracing its inherent design. If you prefer Vim’s keybindings, use Vim. If you prefer Emacs’ extensibility, learn to use Emacs properly.
Configuration Bloat: The 5-Second Boot Time Tragedy
Another common sight in the Emacs community is the celebration of massive configuration files. Users proudly share their init.el files, some spanning over 4,000 lines of Elisp code, as if complexity were a badge of honor rather than a sign of maximalist thinking.
What’s the result of these extensive configurations? Boot times that stretch into the seconds—sometimes five seconds or more just to open a text editor! This is the antithesis of minimalism, which values efficiency and simplicity above all else.
Think about what happens during those five seconds. Your computer is loading thousands of lines of code, initializing dozens of packages, and setting up countless customizations—most of which you’ll never use in that particular editing session. It’s the digital equivalent of carrying a fully-stocked toolbox when all you need is a screwdriver.
I’ve spoken with Emacs users who say things like, “It’s fine, I just start Emacs once in the morning and keep it running all day.” But this is merely justifying inefficiency rather than addressing it. A truly minimalist approach would question why the editor needs so much setup time in the first place.
The Built-in Solution: Embracing Native Functionality
The path to a truly minimalist Emacs experience begins with a radical step: delete your configuration. Yes, all of it. Start fresh, with nothing but the default settings that come with Emacs itself.
What you’ll discover might surprise you. Vanilla Emacs is incredibly capable right out of the box. It includes:
- A powerful file browser (dired-mode)
- Project management capabilities
- Built-in version control support
- A comprehensive help system
- Multiple window management
- And much, much more
Most of the functionality people add through packages already exists in some form within Emacs itself. The difference? The built-in versions might require learning a few more keyboard shortcuts or commands, but they’re often more stable, more efficient, and more in line with Emacs’ design philosophy.
Instead of adding a package for every minor convenience, challenge yourself to learn how Emacs was designed to solve that problem. You’ll not only have a more minimalist setup but also a deeper understanding of the tool you’re using.
The Learning Curve Fallacy
Many Emacs users justify their extensive configurations by citing the infamous Emacs learning curve. “It’s too hard to use without these packages,” they say. “These customizations make Emacs more accessible.”
This argument fundamentally misunderstands the nature of minimalism. Minimalism isn’t about making things easier in the short term; it’s about intentionally choosing a path that might be more difficult initially but leads to greater simplicity and mastery in the long run.
Yes, learning Emacs keybindings can be challenging. Yes, understanding how to navigate buffers, windows, and frames requires effort. But these difficulties are features, not bugs. They force you to slow down, to think about what you’re doing, to be deliberate in your actions—all core tenets of minimalist philosophy.
By skipping this learning process through extensive customizations, you’re not becoming more minimalist; you’re avoiding the very intentionality that minimalism demands.
A Personal Journey to Emacs Minimalism
When I first started using Emacs, I fell into the same traps I’m warning against now. My init file grew to over 2,000 lines. My Emacs took nearly seven seconds to start up. I had so many packages that I couldn’t even remember what all of them did.
Then, during a particularly zealous minimalist phase in my life where I was questioning every possession, I turned that same critical eye to my digital tools. What I saw horrified me: I had become a digital hoarder while preaching physical minimalism.
So I did something drastic: I deleted my entire Emacs configuration and started over with nothing but the defaults. The first few days were painful. I had grown so dependent on my customizations that using vanilla Emacs felt like trying to write with my non-dominant hand.
But something interesting happened after about a week. I started to appreciate the elegance of Emacs’ default design. I discovered built-in commands that I never knew existed because my custom keybindings had overwritten them. I found that many of the “essential” packages I’d been using were redundant.
Most surprisingly, I found that my coding and writing actually improved. Without the constant distraction of tweaking my editor, I focused more on the content I was creating. Isn’t that the whole point of minimalism? To eliminate distractions and focus on what truly matters?
The True Minimalist Emacs Configuration
If you’re committed to the minimalist philosophy and want to apply it to your Emacs usage, here’s my recommendation for a truly minimalist configuration:
- Start with vanilla Emacs
- Add configurations only when you encounter actual, repeated friction in your workflow
- Look for built-in solutions before adding external packages
- Question every line in your configuration: “Does this serve a purpose that justifies its existence?”
- Regularly review and remove configurations that you no longer need
My current Emacs configuration is less than 100 lines. It loads instantly. It does everything I need it to do, and nothing I don’t. That’s minimalism in practice.
The Productivity Misconception
There’s a common belief that more features, more customizations, and more integrations lead to greater productivity. This is rarely true, and often the opposite is the case.
Every feature you add comes with a cost: mental overhead, maintenance requirements, potential conflicts, and increased complexity. Each customization is something you need to remember, something that might break with the next update, something that distances you from the core functionality of the tool.
True productivity comes not from having every possible feature at your fingertips, but from deeply understanding a smaller set of powerful tools. It’s the difference between a chef with 100 specialized gadgets and one with a few well-made knives—the latter will almost always be more efficient because their tools become extensions of themselves rather than objects requiring conscious thought to use.
Embracing the Constraints
Minimalism is, at its heart, about embracing constraints. It’s about finding freedom within limitations rather than seeking freedom from limitations.
Vanilla Emacs has constraints. It won’t behave exactly like VSCode or Sublime Text. It won’t have that specific plugin you saw someone using on YouTube. It might require you to type a few more characters for certain operations.
But these constraints can be valuable. They force you to think differently, to solve problems creatively, to develop workflows that are truly your own rather than copied from someone else’s configuration file.
Conclusion: The Minimalist Editor Within
The next time you find yourself adding yet another package to your Emacs configuration, pause and ask yourself: Is this addition aligned with minimalist principles? Am I adding this because it serves a genuine need, or because I’m caught in the cycle of endless optimization?
Remember that minimalism isn’t about having the perfect setup; it’s about questioning whether you need a setup at all. It’s about recognizing when “good enough” is actually perfect.
Your Emacs doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s. It doesn’t need to have every feature under the sun. It just needs to be an effective tool that stays out of your way and lets you focus on what truly matters: the words, code, or ideas you’re trying to express.
Strip away the unnecessary. Embrace the built-in functionality. Learn the tool as it was designed to be used. That’s the path to a truly minimalist Emacs experience.
And perhaps, in that process, you’ll discover that the most minimalist editor isn’t about the software at all—it’s about the mindset you bring to it.
Happy editing, fellow minimalists. Less is more.