Fragbot has an interesting reddit post talking about using Emacs as a standalone infrastructure that can be shared by others. The idea is that you integrate Emacs into a workflow for use by folks who aren’t normally Emacs users. He even has a link to Steve Yegge’s famous story about the Mailman application at Amazon as an example.
Dante Catalfamo has a similar story although in his case it was for personal use. Catalfamo’s problem is that he maintains several machines and VMs at a couple of remote providers as well as at his home. There’s a lot going on and it’s hard to remember what’s running where and the particulars of each machine and application.
To keep track of everything, he has a servers.org file that contains all the information. Org’s hierarchical structure is perfect for that. He has the sites as first level headers, machines under those, and bullet lists specifying the applications running on those machines. He has property drawers with information about the OS, IP address, user name and password, and other data about each machine.
Finally, he wrote a custom exporter to take the information in servers.org and produce an SSH configuration file. That’s a nice feature because after he makes a change he need merely export it to update his SSH configuration file.
Notice that in none of this is Emacs really being used as an editor. The servers.org file could, in fact, be maintained with any editor all. Of course, Catalfamo makes use of Org’s searching and organizing capabilities too but, again, Emacs is not really being used as an editor and anyone could, with a little training, take over the maintenance of the system. It’s another nice example showing that Emacs is better thought of as an environment rather than (merely) an editor.
Catalfamo’s post is interesting and well worth taking a look at if you’re an Org user or thinking of becoming one.