I abandoned Emacs for a year or so and used BBEdit for regex-replace and VS Code for dev tasks. Also gave up on org-mode and org-roam because I could not find a mobile companion. Adopted Obsidian for all my note taking use-cases and journaling in markdown.

A few weeks ago I asked myself if I can use Emacs as a front end for my markdown files in my Obsidian vault. So I started setting up Emacs for searching files via counsel-fzf and via ripgrep (I can jump to any heading in my markdown files, find any content in my 17k+ files, in an instant, using Emacs). I use yasnippet for templates.

After a week or so I realize this:

0. I love writing documents in Emacs, use Elisp to automate my workflow, and have all my files available on the go via Obsidian.

1. Emacs + Elisp are a wonderful platform for all things text.

2. Markdown is less capabable then org-mode, but it's available everywhere.

3. Org-mode is tied to Emacs, and thus no mobile solution.

4. Broke down my 5k lines Emacs config file into packages and import them. This made it more managable. And now I version control my configs and packages. This also made it more managable.

I still use VS Code for writing code, BBEdit for regex search/replace across files, I just have re-discovered Emacs again. It's just unbelievably versatile with the Emacs Lisp language. I cannot automate Obsidian just as fast (or at all).

## Edit

I have said fare-well to Emacs soo many times, just to realize how absolutely lovely it is / was, and come back to it. Always. And then, with a fresh perspective, appreciating it even more. So I don't believe this fella is going to stay away from it :)

## Edit 2

What boosted my Emacs usage is ChatGPT and Claude 3. I have never created that many Emacs packages in my life like in the past two weeks or so. With the right prompt and a few iterations I can make Emacs do whatever I need it to do. Absolutely stunnig.