Emacs In Pop Culture

Ian Pan has curated a nice collection of Emacs caught in the wild. By “in the wild” I mean “in popular culture”: things like movies and comics. Most of us have seen the familiar scene from Tron but Pan has a bunch of others.

One example is the famous scene from Silicon Valley in which Richie and Winnie start arguing about Tabs versus Spaces and end up discovering that one is a Vim user and the other an Emacs user. I’ve seen that scene many times but didn’t realize where it came from so I learned something new from his post.

The other surprising thing—to me—is that Emacs also makes appearances in comics. What’s interesting is that you rarely see any editor other than Emacs or Vi(m) mentioned outside geek circles. Perhaps the current cohort of hackers will change that and we’ll start seeing references to VS Code. Or maybe not. VS Code does have a lot of users but I haven’t seen the same culture grow up around it. We’ll see.

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