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The migration from modern editors to Emacs often resembles an intricate ritual – a sentiment perfectly captured in one developer's recent blog post. What begins as a simple editor switch evolves into weeks of yak shaving: tweaking buffers, wrestling with projectile commands, and writing custom elisp functions, all while drawing unexpected parallels to the delicate art of tea preparation.

When Editors Demand Sacrifice

The author details abandoning Sublime Text after a decade, immediately confronting Emacs' legendary learning curve. Simple tasks become puzzles:

"I’ve disabled Evil mode for now, I don’t think I’m ready for that yet... I have no idea what I’m doing! Wait, press OPT-X—no, C-x p c—and make it serve files instead."

Buffer management proves particularly treacherous, with accidental window closures and mysterious behavior forcing reliance on commands like (setq mac-right-option-modifier nil) just to type accented characters. This struggle mirrors the precision required for tea brewing – where water temperature and steeping time make the difference between perfection and bitterness.

Elisp: The Customization Superpower

The true power emerges through customization. Dissatisfied with Hugo workflow limitations, the author crafts an elisp function for Markdown post auto-completion:

(defun bb/hugo-post-only-complete ()
  "List every .md file specifically inside 'content/post/'..."
  (interactive)
  (when-let ((root (projectile-project-root)))
    (let* ((post-dir (expand-file-name "content/post/" root))
...

This function populates links dynamically by scanning project directories – a tangible productivity win justifying the initial struggle. Yet deeper configuration awaits, like optimizing Projectile's sluggish file indexing with (projectile-indexing-method 'alien) to leverage native OS tools.

The Never-Ending Yak

Persistent frustrations reveal Emacs' philosophical core: endless customization. Saving compile commands across sessions requires wrestling with savehist and data serialization:

"projectile saves it as a hashset, not list, that savehist can’t serialize. Adding custom hooks to convert data types fails as the trigger order of events gets me confused even more. This yak suddenly got much, much bigger."

Like perfect tea brewing – where 80°C water and precise timing are non-negotiable – Emacs demands exactitude. Packages conflict (toggle-word-wrap breaks Treemacs), shortcuts misbehave (C-x p triggers wrong project commands), and solutions spawn new problems.

Why Developers Persist

Despite chaos, victories feel revolutionary. That custom Hugo function proves more efficient than Sublime Text's native capabilities. Pinch-zooming images (even if temporarily broken) represents hard-won progress. As with tea mastery, Emacs proficiency comes through iterative refinement – where today's frustration fuels tomorrow's breakthrough. The journey is the destination, and the yaks, like tea leaves, keep steeping.