Who Cares About Emacs?

Over at Opensource.com, Seth Kenlon has an article that asks the question, “Who cares about Emacs?” After all, the editor is ancient. Its GNU incarnation has been around since 1983 and there are plenty of glittery new editors to choose from. Furthermore, whatever functionalities you like in Emacs are probably available in those other editors too. Kenlon asks if Emacs is even relevant anymore.

Of course, we all know the answer. Kenlon gives several reasons why learning and using Emacs still makes a lot of sense. You can read the article for the complete list but the two that resonated with me were that Emacs works just fine in text mode and, most importantly, that it’s hackable.

Some folks prefer using Emacs in a terminal—and emacsclient makes that simple and painless—but even those of us who prefer the GUI there are times when the GUI version is too heavyweight. In those cases, having a text based Emacs with all the features of the GUI version—modulo things like displaying PDFs or images—is a real win.

Of course, the thing that sets Emacs apart is its hackability. Lots of editors claim they’re hackable but often this means, “We provide an API and maybe a scripting language to use with it.” Emacs is not like that. At its base, Emacs is a Lisp interpreter and almost all its functionality is implemented in that Lisp. The important point is that that Lisp is available to the user too, so you can change or add functionality on the same basis as the original implementers. There’s no API to limit what you can do; you can do anything.

Hardcore Emacsers won’t learn anything they didn’t already know but the article is an enjoyable read and worth a few minutes of your time.

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