Emacs in the Humanities

I stumbled across a link to this post in the Emacs reddit and ignored it but curiosity go the better of me so I went back to it. Like most Irreal readers (I assume) the label nerd or geek can appropriately be applied to me so the question, “Is anybody using emacs in the humanities or divinity?” wouldn’t normally interest me. Except for the Emacs part.

In any event, I did follow the link and found a pretty interesting discussion from folks in the humanities on how they are using Emacs—and often AUCTeX and Org mode—for their work and writing. It’s a tribute to the power and usefulness of Emacs that people so far removed from the technical world that most of us live in nevertheless find it useful and worth the pain of learning it.

These folks deserve our admiration not only for taking the trouble to learn Emacs but also for enduring the friction it adds to their everyday work. Remember that Word stands supreme in the humanities and if you’re using Emacs you have to worry about converting your work to a form that your colleagues can read and work with. As for writing \(\LaTeX\) with Word: shudder.

This entry was posted in General and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.