Over at the Emacs reddit, shackra asks if people use or used Emacs at school. By “school” he appears to mean “at college or university” so this isn’t about whether we should teach 8th graders to use Emacs. So far, there have been only a few (eight as of this writing) answers but the discussion is already interesting.
The thing that struck (and delighted) me the most was that all but one of the commenters were from disciplines other than computer science. The one developer was Mickey from Matering Emacs so, of course, his answer is interesting too. There was also a physics major and a civil engineer representing the technical fields.
The other respondents were from History and English. It’s not news that people from the liberal arts use Emacs too, of course, but even though I know better I’m always surprised. Of course, I shouldn’t be. Folks in fields like English and History do a lot of writing and probably wrangle just as much or more text than we engineers do. Why wouldn’t they want to use the best possible tool to do that? There are plenty of people in those fields—just as there are in ours—who are too lazy or unconscious of the possibilities to look beyond the default answer of Microsoft Word but the wiser of them invest a bit of their time in learning a tool that will pay dividends throughout their career rather than frustrate them at every turn.
The nice thing about using a tool like Emacs is that although the gatekeepers at journals and professional organizations insist of Word documents, you can still use a decent editor and export to the desired format with Pandoc. Of course Pandoc doesn’t convert between every possible format but it does accept Org Markup, Markdown, and LaTeX and will happily output docx formatted documents, which is probably the only target that non-STEM people need to worry about.
So the answer to shackra’s question is: Yes, Emacs is used by people at school all the time and some of their uses may surprise you.