The Beginning of an Obsession Anyone who has been in my vicinity for than 5 minutes will know that I LOVE Emacs. More than any man should reasonably love any program, let alone a programm from the 70’s. I spend countless hours tweaking my config (and yes I use Spacemacs, which is still customizable), and I’m a frequent attendee of New York City Emacs. The thing that I love most about it is how customizable and programmable it is. Since, I spend most of my day interacting with text on a computer having a platform for automating text interaction allows me to remove a lot of pain from my day. Unfortunately many people I preach to don’t quite understand how this can be a benefit. Today, I’m going to document a use case where the power of Emacs saved me hours of programming.

So anyone who knows me will know that I love tools that are configured with dotfiles. Generally I find these tools are more powerful and faster than their (generally) graphical counterparts. I love dotfiles so much that I even wrote a tool to help me manage them: DFM. With all that said I’ve spent many years and hours tweaking my dotfiles and after sharing them with my good friend Chas Busenburg he remarked at how much useful stuff was in my bashrc. I had never really thought about it, I see it as piles of hacks and duct tape, but it does have quite a few useful functions and tricks probably unknown to many Bash users / enthusiasts. So it is on that note that I welcome you to the guided tour of my bashrc. If you’re looking for the full version for reference you can find it with the rest of my dotfiles here.