Back in 2015, I wrote about Josh Stella’s wonderful article on A CEO’s Guide to Emacs. Someone just posted a link to Stella’s post so I took the opportunity to reread it. It seems just as apropos now as it did then.
The TL;DR is that Stella began his career as a developer and basically lived in Emacs. He used it for everything. With the passage of time he moved on from his developer role and became a CEO (of Fugue). Like CEOs everywhere, he used a multitude of applications to get his work done. But his life as a developer had taught him to eschew context switching and to value a uniform UI to the applications he needed. On day he realized that what he really wanted was Emacs so he started a small experiment to see if he really could use Emacs in his role as a CEO.
The answer, of course, was an emphatic yes and he devotes part of his post explaining why. The rest of the post is a quick introduction to Emacs and how to set it up. His purpose was to bootstrap other CEOs into the Emacs world. He was pretty realistic about this undertaking and stated up front that if you’ve never done any coding or other technical work, Emacs probably isn’t for you. But if you have, Emacs can open a world of opportunity.
Some of his recommendations are a bit outdated (2015, remember) but it has aged well. It’s definitely worth a read even if you read it back when he first published it.