Hey, everyone, I couldn’t find the rules for this community so I assume this kind of off-topic/open-ended post is allowed. Sorry if it isn’t, let me know and I’ll delete the post. The last paragraph is the actual prompt, everything in between is just my own answer to it.

I recently came across this blog post where the author establishes some parallels between Emacs, Dwarf Fortress, and generative AI (just ignore that part). It got me thinking about my own history with Emacs.

I always thought I liked both Emacs and Dwarf Fortress despite the complexity, not because of it. But after reading the post I started thinking about the time when I got into both, which was around the same time I got into programming. I was really down in life, feeling hopeless, deep depression, everything felt awful and pointless. I started playing Minecraft (I was already an adult, just unemployed) and compulsively trying mods, and it still felt empty. Then I started trying to learn Java so I could make my own mods. Java was awful and traumatic, so I tried C instead, and it kinda took the pain away, like an infinitely deep rabbit hole that kept me distracted from reality without ever hitting the bottom. It made me feel safe to keep falling deeper and deeper.

Well, Minecraft led me to Dwarf Fortress since it’s mentioned everywhere as the main inspiration. Once I found out it was implemented in C and C++, I started playing around with ncurses, trying to make a roguelike, but C was so quirky that I got interested in languages themselves, which led me to lisp/scheme, which led me to Emacs. I remember when I kinda settled between playing around with Emacs (great way to procrastinate actually studying) on my “productive” time and then playing Dwarf Fortress on my leisure time. I remember how seamless my life felt for a while, as if I finally had some cohesion between everything I was doing (at that point I had tried a bunch of careers, dropped out of university quite a few times, I was completely lost).

So yeah, I kept digging around in Emacs, messing stuff up and rage-deleting my init.el, same way I would rage-quit Dwarf Fortress whenever I felt things getting ugly. I would try to go deep in some aspect of Emacs and then go deep in some subsystem of Dwarf Fortress, and then I would give up because everything seemed so interconnected I ended up going broad without realizing. I remember feeling super proud of tiny accomplishments such as writing and keybinding a script that would take a file name without the extension, then open the file.c and file.h side by side and a smaller shell window on the bottom, only to realize how little effort it spared me once I memorized the window manipulation keybindings. Like I was essentially treating Emacs like a game, a sandbox for infinite exploration, same thing that had previously lured me to Minecraft, programming, and Dwarf Fortress. And the worst part is I still do that after almost a decade, hehe, long after quitting Dwarf Fortress.

I’m curious if anyone here has played Dwarf Fortress and would like to share their experiences and any similarities they might see, or even people who didn’t play Dwarf Fortress but would like to share how they relate to Emacs’ complexity, if they think it played a part in their adoption either as a pro or a con. Also, if I ever get back to Dwarf Fortress, I’m definitely making a fortress-mode, lol.