Protesilaos Stavrou has posted his talk to LibrePlanet 2022 on Emacs and the meaning of freedom as understood by those of us in the free software community. The talk is comprehensive in that he starts with an explanation of what Emacs is, moves on to how he uses it, and finally discusses its relationship to freedom and personal autonomy.
The point of Emacs, according to Stavrou, is its extensibility. In a large sense, the freedom that Emacs brings lies in its extensibility rather than the legalities associated with its copyright. Like me, Stavrou considers Emacs not just an editor but a Lisp Machine. It’s being a Lisp Machine, he says, that brings Emacs its power. That’s because the user can customize Emacs to suit their own workflow. It allows the user to take control of their computer in a way that most other software doesn’t.
The other important aspect of Emacs that helps make that freedom possible is that it’s self-documenting. It’s extensibility would be far less useful without the documentation. After all, what’s the point of being extensible if you can’t discover how to use it.
I found the talk interesting and Stavrou’s take on the freedom associated with Emacs provocative and worth thinking about. The video is 37 minutes, 24 seconds long so you’ll need to schedule some time.