Joshua Blais has an interesting post that looks at the idea of using Emacs for everything. That’s a familiar meme for us Emacsers, of course, but you don’t often see a careful, considered examination of the idea. Blais is an Emacs user so his post is, naturally, supportive of the idea but he does try to give both sides of the issue.
Blais’ main argument is built around the flow concept. Interrupting a knowledge worker’s flow can have devastating effects on their productivity. These interruptions include context switches and one study suggests that context switching and multitasking takes up around 60% of our working time. That seems high to me but whatever the value, it’s certainly significant.
One of the virtues of Emacs is that virtually all your text based tasks can be done in Emacs. That’s significant because the editor provides a uniform interface to all those tasks. Indeed, you can even slip it into other apps with packages like Emacs Everywhere that allow you to bring up an Emacs window to edit some app’s text area. For example, I use it with iMessage so that I can compose my texts in Emacs.
The advantage to doing most things in Emacs is that you avoid context switches and can better stay in the flow. A secondary benefit, as least for me, is that it provides a single set of muscle memories to deal with. As I’ve said before, I do better with a single set of keybindings so folding everything possible into Emacs is a win for me.
Blais also considers and dismisses the argument that Emacs takes so long to learn that you never regain the time “lost” to learning it. Even a few seconds thought is enough to recognize that idea for the silliness it is but Blais makes the point that if you aren’t using Emacs you’re still spending time learning other utilities that Emacs would otherwise handle. I know this first hand. Before I came to Emacs I was a long time command line user and spent years learning to use it effectively. Now I rarely use the command line; everything I need to do I can do from within Emacs.
Blais’ post is well worth a few minutes of your time whether or not you’re an Emacs user. Take a look.