Playing with Emacs

• This post is my second Emacs carnival entry, this time for Sept 2026. If you're new to this site, FYI I go by Zororg in emacs chat/universe.

Coincidentally I just wrote on Games that occupied my life in my previous post, but it covers more on what all games I've played till now mostly.

Every emacs users (>1 YOE to qualify) would know that emacs is the tinkering lisp machine, all you do everyday is tweak and play with it. Emacs is like a big playground, the definite workshop to all users.

I don't play any game in emacs as such, but one thing that impress me everytime I run is, M-x zone. Not the graphical screensaver you'd expect, but the ASCII text dancing around my screen is so blissful to watch. Never seen any editor do that, CLI programs can do, but having in emacs is chef's kiss for me. IMO it should also be easy to program it to behave like cava (music visualizer) to make a package that integrates with mpd/mpv and M-x zone mode dances along!

wow I'm serious I just got this prompt while writing this, anyone can feel free to go ahead. Even I plan to experiment this at some point. Additionally if lyrics can be fetched to dance with you (≧∇≦)/

Or you can say it was unconscious memory that sparked since I watch Tsoding livestream where he has been programming a Jai program to play song and show with cool visualization.

I read alot of epub thanks to nov.el package, embracing ASCII text is always great. I seldom use PDFs, in fact I don't use sioyek (one of the best software IMO) as well. I really wanna use emacs-reader but I have stopped using pdf altogether 😅

These days I only Emacs, Glide browser, terminal, Agentic coding (work) as my four pillars of computing interface. Anything else? the answer always been emacs again. Its like a cycle, nothing goes out of these 4 honestly.

This just proves how much playful emacs is, its surely is a small community, but every discussion and updates on #emacs always provides a smile on every emacs users (again, >1 YOE to realize). Every "aha" moment is always a TIL for someone and remember me notes for all veterans.

Another game of emacs I like is, how its a swimming pool of texts. You breath text, you see text and even you edit the text (please do if not).

Emacs has always been a playful machine that mends to the user and not make user mend to it.

Emacs is what every software should be designed as: something that keeps you busy playing with it, so you never get around to actually using it.