Everyday I see several articles from—usually—younger developers opining that Emacs is too old-fashioned, non-intuitive, and, really, just too hard to bother learning. And, it doesn’t look nice like VS Code and other modern editors.
Okay, they’re young and don’t know any better. Maybe they’ll learn as they go along. But there are also older developers who have been using Emacs for years who say they’ve been seduced by the bling, and lately, AI integration. They too are choosing to use editors other than Emacs.
One would think, from reading all those posts, that there’s a one way current flowing from Emacs towards those lesser other editors. But that’s not true. There are still people who get a hint of Emacs’ power and make the effort to learn it. Ivan Prikaznov is a case in point.
He came into an IntelliJ shop as a green engineer so, of course, he used the IntelliJ IDEA editor like all his colleagues. But then he stumbled on Vim and learned about efficient editing. Eventually, he changed jobs and found himself editing a large configuration file. He realized that he was “essentially executing an algorithm by hand”. At that point he grasped that what he needed was a programmable editor and he turned to Emacs.
He hasn’t looked back. Now he does everything in Emacs and the Borg has assimilated a new member. Or something. In any event, it’s nice to know that Emacs is also gaining converts. It may not be a rapidly as the “in” editors but we’ve always known that Emacs is for the discerning.