Almost three years ago, I wrote about Josh Stella, a former programmer who had become the CEO of his company. Stella found that he really hated all the context switching required as he moved from application to application. So he decided to return to Emacs but as a CEO rather than technical user. His original post discussed why he was doing that and what his experience was like.
Now, Stella is switching roles and becoming the CTO of his company and decided to revisit his Emacs post in light of the 3 years experience he’d had using it as a company officer rather than one of the technical staff. All-in-all, he concludes that the experiment was successful and that using Emacs made him happier and more productive. He liked the way Emacs stayed out of his way and wasn’t constantly demanding his attention.
He also liked that Emacs was more ergonomic than other applications. We Emacsers don’t often hear that but Stella says that using an ergonomic keyboard combined with a much reduced reliance on mouse operations cured the RSI problems he was having. He discusses that at some length so if you’re an Emacser who’s suffering from RSI problems, you should take a look at what he did.
He also wrote that he gave up trying to use Org mode to keep his calendar and TODO lists. That, he said, was because he shares that information with many people who weren’t Emacs users. There are, of course, packages that move entries between Emacs and Google/Apple calendar but he decided it was simpler to just use Google calendar like everyone else at his company.
The post is an interesting retrospective on the experiences of a CEO using Emacs and well worth a read.