A Conversation with Mickey

Syntopikon has an interesting interview with Mickey Petersen, the proprietor of Mastering Emacs and all around Emacs expert and expositor. He’s no stranger to Irreal readers so it’s always nice to see him discuss matters. The last time I remember seeing an interview with him was in 2014 in an on-line chat with Sacha Chua.

Like many of us, Mickey abandoned his first attempt to use Emacs. That was in his pre-college days when he was just discovering and learning Linux. Later, when he got to the university, he adopted Emacs party in reaction to the noisy voices insisting that all real hackers used Vim. When you read Mickey now, it’s easy to believe that he’s always had a thorough knowledge of Emacs and didn’t struggle like the rest of us. Of course, that’s wrong. He used it for some time before, as he says, the light came on and he realized the true potential of Emacs.

He also has an interesting exchange with the interviewer on the use of Emacs for non-technical or technical-adjacent users. The interviewer is an Emacs user too but he uses it for writing. I’ve long felt that all writers should at least try Emacs. After all, it’s all about wrangling text whether you’re a developer or a writer and Emacs excels at that. If you learn enough Elisp to make minor customization’s you can mold Emacs into a your ideal writing environment. Mickey believes that more could be done to make learning Emacs easier for the non-developer and he explores a few of those in the interview.

Like most things that Mickey’s involved with, the interview is interesting and worth reading. A few minutes of your time would be well spent.

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