Like me, Marcin Borkowski (mbork) hates writing text in anything but Emacs. Sadly, most of us can’t live in Emacs all the time so we sometimes find ourselves having to enter text in some other application. It always ends up being painful for me. If I make a typo, I can’t correct it with a single shortcut and, most importantly, without the mouse. I don’t have completion and I can’t navigate around easily the way I do in Emacs. All of this despite the fact that on macOS you can enable many of the Emacs key bindings.
Recently, mbork discovered Emacs Everywhere. It’s an application that launches an Emacs frame and populates a buffer in it with whatever was in the text area you were in when you invoked it. You can then edit or replace that text as you see fit and when you’re done, it gets saved back to the original text area. And voilà, you’ve entered/edited text in an arbitrary application with Emacs.
I’ve been using it for about a year and really like it. I have it bound to ⌘ Cmd+F6 so it’s easy to invoke from anywhere. My only problem with it is that I forget to use it. I write thousands of words a week and only a few of those are not in Emacs so when I do have to write some text outside of Emacs, I simply forget to use Emacs Everywhere.
But don’t let my inability to remember what I’m doing stop you. Emacs Everywhere works fine on both Linux and macOS. I can’t find any evidence that it works on Windows—leave a comment if you know either way.
It’s available on MELPA so it’s easy to install. Or you can checkout its Github repository. If you like the Emacs editing experience, give it a try. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.