Protesilaos Stavrou (Prot) just put up an interesting post that serves as a nice coda to yesterday’s Irreal post, Emacs As a 2D CLI. His take is not so much that Emacs fits nicely into the Unix paradigm but that for some things at least, it’s better. He builds his post around an email he got asking him why one should switch to Emacs.
His response is that if your current solution is working for you, there’s no reason to switch. Like me, Prot came to Emacs from Vim but for different reasons. We agree that Emacs and Vim offer two different types of workflow and reasonable people can prefer either over the other. He views Emacs as providing a unifying integration over the tools that he uses. Rather than writing glue code for every pipeline, he lets Emacs take care of that.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about a video in which Luke Smith asked people to send him videos (only) to convince him to switch to Emacs. I was not kind in my commentary because I found it annoying and presumptuous to ask the rest of the world to spend time providing very a specific type of content so he wouldn’t have to do his own research. His video was all the more annoying given that what he wanted was already available if he’d bothered to look. By happenstance, Prot’s interlocutor offers up another video by Smith in which he talks about the offerings he received and how he still wasn’t going to switch or even give Emacs and honest try. That video is as annoying as the first. His comments on Org-mode were particularly tiresome because they boiled down to, ‘Everyone says Org is cool; I don’t know anything about it; It’s not for me.’
Prot calls him out on the video saying he’s perfectly free to use whatever works best for him but that if he’s going to comment on Emacs he should at least know what he’s talking about. In other words, that he should give it an honest try for 6 months and then tell us what he thinks.
Prot’s post make a few other good points and also provides an alternative view of the Emacs/Unix question. It’s well worth a few minutes of your time.