I gave a talk "Play Emacs like an instrument" this week. It's a general talk about all the good things that can be done in Emacs. Maybe someone of you would enjoy it: https://200ok.ch/posts/2018-04-27_Play_Emacs_like_an_Instrument.html

Nice! > Emacs renaissance came with the advent of Clojure Probably Clojure helped indeed, but I think that Spacemacs contributed more to the “return” of Emacs 🙂

Not so sure about that. But of course I'm biased, since Spacemacs doesn't follow the main principle of the talk (simple is better than complex + learning a proven paradigm properly supersedes following the newest hypes). On the other hand I'm not going to argue with the guy whose name came up quite a few times - probably only "Emacs" itself was mentioned more often(;

I held the talk at the Clojure Meetup for Zurich (Switzerland), too. So there's the second bias. For that group, it was definitively true since most of them were using Emacs (with Cider!) due to Clojure, but only a minority was using Emacs for non-dev related work.

I understand your viewpoint, then, too. Before Clojure, I was using VIM for ~14 years and only vaguely new that Emacs should/would/could be "better". Before my third try with Clojure, though, I didn't really get "LISP" - all I knew was that I should spend more time with it, because it had this magical quality to it which kept drawing me in. That was about 4 years ago when using VIM with Fireplace would be pretty painful. VIM was doing linting/syntax highlighting synchronously - which wasn't a problem until I tried it with Clojure. It meant switching buffers took multiple seconds. When I realized that Emacs had a proper VIM implementation by then (evil), it only took me 30 minutes to move most of my VIM knowledge (minus a couple plugins) to Emacs. And shortly after that I was completely hooked! Since Emacs, in principle, is mainly a Lisp Repl, has hooks and all other functions are advisable, it opened so many doors. The last years were a continuous gain in momentum for me - I moved so many workflows into Emacs. Not because I had to, but because it was more efficient, more fun and future proof (text >> proprietary tools/formats). It's been such a wonderful (literally) experience. Btw, I do like Ruby and Python, too(; And I do like to write Ruby in Emacs, too. With robe-mode and rubocop, it's quite a nice experience, imho. Not as good as Emacs/Cider, of course. Btw, I also demoed both during the talk and gave credit where it is due^^ Are you using a different editor/IDE when writing Ruby? As I understand it from a talk of you and your great OSS contributions, you're spending a lot of your professional career doing Ruby.