This is another post about the Emacs Carnival on Writing. This time it concerns a contribution by Randy Ridenour, a Philosophy Professor at Oklahoma Baptist University. I especially like stories like his because he’s a non-technical user who nevertheless made the effort to learn Emacs and bend it to his will.
You can read about his editor journey here but the interesting part, for me, is in his Emacs Writing Carnival post. If you read his previous post about his editor journey, you’ll see that he’s tried a (surprising) number of different editors but has settled on Emacs.
It was not love a first sight. Like many of us, he flirted with Emacs but had problems with it so he moved on but he kept hearing Emacs’ siren song and eventually returned. Later, he wrote his Emacs Carnival post in which he revisited his original objections to Emacs and why they no longer apply.
He notes that the mistake he made in his earlier rejection of Emacs was to think of it as just another editor that expected you to adapt to its way of doing things. Emacs, of course, is not like that. It’s often described as an editor kit or as editor building material. Once he realized that, Ridenour made his peace with Emacs and has been a faithful user for more than a decade.
He also discusses the difficulties in publishing as an Emacs using, liberal arts professor: Your end product must be submitted as a Word document. That’s not too bad when you’re a solo author because you can write in Org and export to Docx but when you have coauthors—who are almost certainly not Emacs users—sooner or later you have to descend into the seventh circle of editors and use Word or one of its siblings.
If you enjoy hearing about how others use Emacs, take a look at Ridenour’s post.