The title almost sounds like something you’d see headlining a parody but it turns out that a medievalist using Emacs is really what this post is about. Joseph R. Johnson is a medievalist at Georgetown who spends a great deal of his time transcribing medieval texts.
That’s harder than you might think—if that’s possible—because different scribes produced subtly different renditions and because they used a lot of abbreviations similar to present day contractions (like “don’t” for “do not”) but not as deterministic as today’s contractions. Johnson’s post has an example that shows how complex those abbreviations can be.
Because the abbreviations can be ambiguous, Johnson puts the letters that the diacritical marks represent in parentheses. An example is v(ost)re where the “ost” in parentheses is represented by a diacritical mark. The problem is that all those parentheses were hard on his hands and he was worried about RSI (he should try Lisp).
The point of this long story is that Johnson is an Emacs user who took the time to learn a little Elisp so that he could leverage its power to ease his transcribing. He implemented an Emacs minor mode that implements easy to type shortcuts that save him from having to type all those parentheses. The post shows several iterations of his efforts.
I love stories like this because it makes the important point that if you deal with text you should be using Emacs. As others have said, Emacs is not so much an editor as it is a framework for dealing with text. That may include editing but it also includes things like email, RSS, playing music, and who knows what. As most of you know, I think of Emacs as a lightweight Lisp Machine, which means, of course, that you can program it to do almost anything. Johnson’s use of Emacs to help his transcription of medieval texts is a case in point.