Emacs and humility

Some people consider Emacs to be an extensible editor, an operating-system living in an editor or a beautiful nightmare. To me it is an important tools and a constant lesson in humility.

I often have the urge to use technology and tools that I can understand, or at least feel like I can understand. With Emacs, I’m constantly reminded that I have no clue of it and that there are countless functions and extensions that people have created over the years that I will never comprehend. I will never understand Emacs completely and maybe that’s ok.

I find it interesting that the incomprehensibility of Emacs frustrates me more than the incomprehensibility of the hardware or operating system I use. It might be because Emacs is my primary interface that causes the most friction while using a computer.