13 is my lucky number, so I’m not going to worry about it.[^1]

– Taylor Swift

Exactly 13 years ago today I published the first Emacs Redux post and kicked off what has become one of the longest running projects in my life. Time flies!

Some Numbers

Over the past 13 years I’ve written 228 articles here. That’s not a lot by some standards, but I’m pretty happy with the consistency. There hasn’t been a single year without at least one post – although 2017 came dangerously close with just 2 articles (written on the 31st of December). Here’s the full breakdown:

Year Posts
2013 68
2014 27
2015 9
2016 11
2017 2
2018 6
2019 6
2020 23
2021 20
2022 8
2023 9
2024 5
2025 16
2026 18

2013 was the clear winner – I was on fire after launching the blog, writing almost 70 posts in a single year. I doubt I’ll ever match that pace again, but you never know.

The Octopress Dark Ages

One thing that almost killed my blogging was Octopress. When I started Emacs Redux it was the hot blogging platform for programmers, but over time it became a real pain to work with. At some point just getting the site to build locally felt like a chore, and that friction killed my motivation to write. I wrote about the migration back in 2018, and looking at it now I can’t help but smile at this bit:

I realized recently that it has been over 10 years since my first blog post. […] One thing never really changed, though - the quality of my writing. It was always abysmally bad…

I also noted there that 2018 marked the blog’s 5th birthday, and that I had failed to keep up the pace I originally set for myself. Some things don’t change! But the migration to a plain Jekyll setup with no extra layers on top made a real difference – that’s still what I’m using today, and it gets out of my way completely. The lesson? Keep your publishing toolchain as simple as possible.

The Editor Landscape

Lots of things have changed in the editor world over the past 13 years, but my love for Emacs remains as strong as ever.

Last year I had a lot of fun rediscovering Vim and wrote a whole series of “How to Vim” articles on batsov.com. I’ve also spent some time with Helix, Zed, and even VS Code (mostly for F# development). Playing with all of these only reinforced my conviction that Emacs is the One True Editor – or at the very least, the right (most fun) editor for me. There’s nothing quite like it!

Recent Activity

Some of you might have noticed that Emacs Redux has been more active than usual over the past few months. Two reasons for that:

  • I’ve been having a lot of fun working on neocaml, and new projects always generate a steady stream of interesting findings worth sharing. I’ve made it a rule of mine to turn those into blog posts instead of letting them fade from memory.
  • I wanted to celebrate this birthday in style, so I promised myself to push a bit harder on the blogging front until today. No promises for the rest of the year, though!

Thank You

A big thank you to everyone who has been reading Emacs Redux over the past 13 years. And to all the people who have supported my Emacs open-source projects – whether by contributing code, filing issues, writing docs, donations, or just spreading the word – you have my gratitude. None of this would be as rewarding without you!

Looking Ahead

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

– Alan Kay

We live in a world that’s changing fast, and the future is always uncertain even in the best of times. But I hope that Emacs (and Emacs Redux) will be alive, well and relevant for many years to come!

In Emacs we trust! Keep hacking!

[^1] Same here I guess, given I was born on the 13th.