A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a reddit post that asked what computer/OS people were using. Nuno M. Salgueiro replied that he was not a programmer or even in IT but that he used Emacs at home on Linux and at work on Windows. This, of course, immediately piqued my interest because I’m always interested in how people who are not programmers or otherwise involved in IT use Emacs.
I asked Salgueiro to expand on how he uses Emacs and he obliged with an excellent discussion of how and why he uses Emacs. I encouraged him to make that into a blog post or at least let me publish it for him. He didn’t seem interested in pursuing the life of a blogger but kindly invited me to post his reply. I thought it was too interesting to be lost in the comments, so here it is, exactly as he wrote it:
In my daily work in a logistics company, I use Emacs to organize nearly everything I do. It’s so central in my workflow that I dedicate an old LCD monitor in vertical orientation just for it.
Most of the stuff I do is in org mode: it’s a record of the knowledge I’ve acquired over the last 15 years; it’s my agenda and TODO list; it’s what I use for taming meetings and taking quick notes; it’s where my projects live, and where thousands of links allow me to open instantly the relevant emails in MS Outlook. Org mode is powerful enough to look like magic when colleagues are by my desk (“Wait, how did you do that?!”). Yes, I’m not above the mundane pleasure of showing off Emacs to innocent souls. ;)
Keyboard macros with a very basic knowledge of regexps is a powerful enough combination to sometimes have colleagues sending over their files and asking me to use “that tool you have for text” to do work in a couple of minutes that would’ve taken them hours. Compared with it, macros in Excel feel like a child’s toy.
I use Dired only sporadically because Windows is a terribly slow environment for it. I get by with Double Commander, an orthodox file manager, which is good enough for my needs. At home, Dired is my file manager.
Another big one for me at work is taking notes on PDFs with org-noter. It’s simply amazing because I don’t need to change the file itself, I just keep all the notes in separate org files in the same folder. This is only for own consumption, of course, but it’s good enough to justify its own workflow.
At home I use org for my diary, as well as its powerful attachment functions all the time. All kinds of documentation for the house/car/health, important receipts, etc., all that is kept in their subtrees with all the necessary context. I wish I could use that at work. sigh
Finally, I used to keep my personal accounting with ledger mode, but never got the will to search for some data importing tools. I was typing everything by hand but it got too repetitive, even using YASnippet. Maybe one day I’ll find something to speed it up and get back on it.
Using Emacs in a work environment void of programmers or software-oriented people is strange. Colleagues look at it and see what seems to be an old text editor, but you suddenly press a few keys and, to their eyes, something amazing happens—maybe it’s a text manipulation that’s impossibly fast in their Word world, or it’s finding the desired information and links in a matter of seconds, or jokingly popping up a game of Tetris—it doesn’t matter, they’ll look at it as something entirely alien to their experience and, most importantly, they have a glimpse of the possibilities. It’s quite a thing to see.
A huge THANK YOU for your blog. I never miss an article of yours (Elfeed is a beast), and I’ve been learning a lot from them already for years. Whenever I see something that could work well for me, I try it. Along the way I learned a little bit of Elisp, enough to be able to integrate pieces of code I find online into my config. When it fits my needs, it’s an absolute joy, a feeling I’m certain many of your readers share.
It is, I think, an excellent discussion of how Emacs can be for everybody and how those who believe Emacs is old and outmoded are invariably amazed at what it can do in the hands of an knowledgeable user. Thanks to Salgueiro for sharing his experience with us.