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A CEO's Guide to Emacs (2015)

by mgd on 1/9/24, 10:59 AM with 87 comments

• by brlewis on 1/11/24, 4:06 PM

  Reading between the lines, I don't think this article is about a particular way of using emacs. I think it's about the psychological safety that comes from using a platform that won't pull the rug out from under you.

  A lot of tools that are commonly depended on today will change on their own schedule. Nice ones will give you warning ahead of time that a change is coming, but you can't opt out of the change. APIs get deprecated. UIs get reorganized. There's not much you can do. With emacs there's an expectation that what worked for you 20 years ago will still work today. And in rare instances where that's not true, you can just not upgrade to a newer version of emacs.

  Working in emacs definitely gives a feeling of control. If anything is ever going to replace emacs (or neovim, which I don't use but I understand is similar), it will have to give the same feelings of control, in addition to the same sense of focus that comes from an uncluttered UI.

• by softirq on 1/11/24, 2:45 PM

  GUIs and proprietary protocols have killed Emacs.

  Emacs isn't an editor, as the post implies, it's an environment. "You can do anything from Emacs" made sense back when everything was open and text based. Nowadays everyone is using Slack, or using an IMAP web client for mail that requires bespoke authentication, or organizer apps that automatically sync across all your devices via the cloud. All of the verticals have been slurped up by corporations who did it better in GUI, have better syncing, and have locked down the protocols needed to bridge, and now the brave Emacs user of 2024 is forced to spend lots of time not in Emacs, thus defeating the point of using Emacs.

  As an editor alone I don't think Emacs is worth it. There's the old adage "They added everything to Emacs but a good editor" and I think that makes sense. If you're not going to live in Emacs for the above reasons then Vim/Neovim is a better editor with a larger community, and VSCode/Jetbrains are better IDEs that are already adopting AI, which will essentially kill off Emacs.

  Emacs still has a lot of important lessons, but I feel bad for new programmers today who will never get the full experience of a text based digital life. Everything has been dumbed down for our own good, and Emacs is now nothing more than a glorified Org editor that forces you to find your own cloud syncing.

• by globular-toast on 1/11/24, 3:00 PM

  This is the article I wanted to write about Emacs. Bravo.

  The comparison to a bicycle is a good one. Emacs is the only software I have ever truly loved. People throw that word around a lot these days, but I mean it. I love it in the same way I love my bicycle. My bicycle is a machine that I've carefully built and maintained, it's been with me through the years, to various places, in all weathers, good and bad, and, ultimately, it carries me to places. Emacs is the only software that comes close to feeling the same way.

  I wonder if the analogy might be lost on people who don't have a bicycle or any machine like it, though.

• by buzzm on 1/11/24, 5:02 PM

  Consistent navigation and keystroke commands for content/context-appropriate basic operations have really been the foundation of my use of the emacs. Yes, there's an elisp integration to everything and Magit is (perhaps..?) the best git client period, but boy ... For example, I have gotten so much mileage out of M-x comment-region across Java, bash, C++, XML. Using Ctrl-S to inc search a dired buffer in the same way I inc search text. And I was delighted when I first used Eclipse to discover that 90% of the keystroke commands that have become muscle memory (nav, save, multilevel undo, block copy and paste...) are the same. Same with bash of course.

• by FredPret on 1/11/24, 3:26 PM

  I wanted to love Emacs. It’s open, it’s kind if cool, apparently it does everything, Randy in the novel Cryptonomicon uses it.

  But I soon spent more time and effort optimizing and working out the kinks in my personal org-roam than doing actual work.

  Now I use good old project management software (Merlin for Mac), Obsidian / Apple for notes, and a written to-do list.

• by ylee on 1/11/24, 10:47 PM

  Welcome back to the club. I've been using Emacs continuously for almost three decades, 99.9999% of the time text-only (whether Linux console, X terminal console, xterm, or SSH client) on a remote server. My email client is VM, written in Emacs Lisp. I've used it to read mail for almost as long as I've used Emacs. I tried Gnus a couple of times for Usenet but stayed with slrn because of Emacs's lack of multithreading. I've never tried Gnus for email because VM has always met my needs.

  VM (and ancillary tools, like Personality Crisis and mairix)

  * does a great of job displaying HTML messages. For the very few that it doesn't, one keystroke sends the message to my web browser running locally.

  * sends URLs I select (all from the keyboard) to the web browser

  * opens images and attachments

  * auto-adjusts the From: line of outgoing messages depending on the recipient

  * archives messages to various folders using various criteria

  * searches my archived mail at lightning speed

  Of course, I can write Emacs Lisp code of my own to extend any or all of the above.

  VM isn't perfect. I'm sure that I could do all of the above with Gnus, and quite possibly am missing out on other features that VM lacks. Overall, though, I really feel like I have a superpower for email handling with it.

• by from-nibly on 1/11/24, 5:12 PM

  For me my "emacs" is my home-manager managed home directory. It's less monolithic, and yes, comprised of a bunch of random apps. But it's a thing I've crafted over years. I rock various apps with various configurations, but at this point it feels like home. I now ask, like a picky little diva, what OS I get to use at new jobs I apply for, because I don't want to rebuild my home.

  I recognize that emacs can run on all operating systems, but my "home" extends out past my terminal, and my text editor. It includes random apps that just don't have an equivalent i.e. my browser, my music service, and my work issued chat app.

  I like to be able to manage ALL of that all the same way, and I can with home-manager, nix and linux.

  Someone tell me what I'm truly missing with emacs.

• by pantulis on 1/11/24, 3:57 PM

  In 2024 someone should write "A CEO's Guide to Obsidian".