The main reason that this blog – and my others – is based on Jekyll is because I want to use Emacs to the extent that I can. The Wordpress editor was just too inelegant for me, and I often found myself editing in Emacs, then copying that to Wordpress.

So when the option came along to have everything using my favorite tools – Emacs, Git, Github, and Markdown – it took me about 122 milliseconds to decide to make the switch.

All was well for a while, as I got used to the Markdown syntax and eventually figured out enough to do some minimal posts. But today, while updating my Java snippets, I saw that there were snippets for “markdown-mode”.

What? Markdown mode?

I followed the simple directions at https://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/, specifically the “Direct Download” section, the result of what you can see in my .emacs, jep-markdown.el, and .emacs.d/lisp/vendor/markdown-mode.el (which is the same as in the first link).

Ironically, or appropriately, enough, this is the first post I’ve written using markdown-mode.

In general, my recommendation is to use a tool to the extent that it can be, and one way that Emacs distinguishes itself is the number of major and minor modes that it supports. As a further example, markdown-mode also supports the specific flavor of Markdown that GitHub uses, making it all that much more valuable.

I mentioned snippets, and if you aren’t using the yasnippet package, I suggest you at least check it out. Yasnippet is to writing code what tab completion is to the command line.

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