Over at The Art Of Not Asking Why, JTR has some nice things to say about Irreal but that’s not what I want to talk about. Rather, I like to address the point of his post, which is how difficult it can be to use Emacs as much as he’d like.
There are two main issues. The first is work problems. Lots of companies make it difficult to use anything other than “approved applications”. These are almost always brain-dead Windows apps that don’t work all that well and certainly don’t interoperate with others apps.This sort of thing is usually driven by what my son calls the “Notwork Nazis”, his term for the network engineering folks having an obsession with making sure that not a single unauthorized activity takes place on “their” network.
These guys don’t—usually—care what you do on your own machine as long as it doesn’t impinge on the network. There are, sadly, more extreme cases. Consider this case of of a company so clueless and intent on controlling every aspect of their employees’ work environment that you can’t use Emacs at all because it’s “An old fashioned and slow text editor created by Canonical for use with the Ubuntu operating system.” These morons are actually scanning machines to make sure no unauthorized editors are being used.
There are many degrees of this dysfunction. If it’s only that you can’t access company Email through Emacs, that may be tolerable. If your management thinks Emacs was developed by Canonical, it’s probably time to find another job.
The second problem that JTR encounters is that Emacs doesn’t interoperate with some apps that are important in his workflow. He gives the example of Grammarly. Being a curmudgeon who doesn’t like being told what to do, I’m not a Grammarly user but I take JTR’s point.
These apps obviously have an API so they can interoperate with others apps but sometimes they’re loath to share them. I’m not sure why that’s so. Wouldn’t you want your app to work with as many other apps a possible?
In any event, it’s a sad truth that it’s not always possible to use Emacs as much as you’d like.