Irreal

As you can probably tell, I’ve become obsessed with Emacs Elevator Pitch posts. I find them particularly instructive because they require the writer to boil down what they like about Emacs to its essence. The latest offering is from Eric Fraga, who I occasionally mention on Irreal.

Fraga begins with the pitch proper. The strength of Emacs, he says, boils down to three of its essential properties:

Discoverbility

Emacs’ builtin help system means that you can always discover what every command, function, and even keystroke does. That help even includes links directly to the source code.

Stability

Ways of working and code you wrote years ago is likely to still work today.

Malleability

This, according to Fraga, is the most important aspect of Emacs. Rather than having to adapt to Emacs’ way of doing things, you adapt Emacs to do things your way. This can be as simple as changing a binding for a command or as complex as modifying or replacing one of Emacs’ builtin functions.

Fraga continues his post by illustrating that last point. He uses Gnus to read his Mastodon toots via the RSS feed. The problem is that Gnus doesn’t provide very helpful information about a toot so it’s hard to know if it’s worthwhile reading it or not.

Fraga solved this problem by writing his own function to display the information for each toot and replaced the Gnus function with it. Take a look at his post to see the difference. Fraga accomplished this by making basically trivial changes to the existing function and using it in place of the original one. Fraga provides the code so you can see how easy it really was.

This is a nice post because it lays out the basic pitch and then illustrates its main point with an actual example. Take a look.

Update [2025-08-29 Fri]: Added link to Fraga’s post. Thanks to William R. Greene for the heads up.

Although, as I have said, the Emacs elevator pitch is a difficult challenge, several people have stepped forward to meet it. Eric MacAdie is one of those people and has provided his own contribution. His approach is to offer some talking points for such a pitch without making an actual elevator pitch himself.

His points, it seems to me, are an excellent précis of what we love about Emacs and why we’re still using it after other editors have come and gone. His post is well worth reading but here’s a short summary of his points.

• When you’re starting, use a a cheat sheet. It’s not a sign of weakness.
• Don’t try to learn everything at once. After you learn the basics you can start worrying about living your life in Emacs.
• In Microsoft products, everything seems easy in the beginning but you soon reach a point where everything is hard. Emacs is just the opposite: at first things seem hard but you soon reach a point where you can do anything you want.
• Emacs is older than the IBM CUA standards and has its own way of doing things. Instead of asking why Emacs doesn’t follow the CUA standards, perhaps you should ask we everyone else isn’t following the Emacs standards.
• Most things in Emacs don’t change. The things you learned 30 years ago still work. At the same time, Emacs continues to evolve and add new capabilities.
• Completion. Completion is one of Emacs’ magical powers. You don’t have to memorize the key chords for every command. Rather you can use Meta+x and an approximation of the command name to bring up list of candidates. Seventeen years on, I’m still using this technique to find seldom used commands.

As I said, MacAdie’s post is a good summary of reasons to use Emacs. Take a look and see if you don’t agree.

I really like Gnuplot. It can take a bit of raw data and produce a first class graph in many different formats. There are two problems:

1. It’s command set is truly baroque and hard to learn
2. I don’t use it often enough to learn that baroque command language

That second problem means that whenever I want to use Gnuplot I have to spend time with its, admittedly excellent, manual. So it’s a two edged sword. On the one hand I don’t use it enough to learn the command set and on the other hand it’s so painful to figure out how to do things that I avoid using it if I can.

Charles Choi feels my—or more likely his own—pain and has put together a prototype Casual app for Gnuplot. He has a video of it in action and it seems really nice. Choi says, though, that it’s far from complete and that it would probably take three or four months of full time effort to get it up to production level. That’s a large commitment and he wonders if it would be worth the effort. In particular, he wants to hear from prospective users if it’s something they’d want and use.

So far, the comments to his post seem overwhelmingly positive. It appears that there’s a real desire for something like this. You can make it happen in two ways. First leave a comment to his post or one of the places he’s linked to expressing your interest in such an app. Second, consider supporting Choi’s work. It can be as easy as simply buying him a cup of coffee.

Update [2025-08-28 Thu 12:01]: Causal → Casual in Title. Thanks to Andreas Elder for the heads up.

The other day when I wrote about Álvaro Ramírez’s elevator pitch post, I mentioned that one of the things I liked was that his list of unexpected tasks that you could accomplish with Emacs contained links to posts where he explored that particular task in more depth. One of those posts was “Help me learn Japanese”. Since I’m learning Spanish, that seemed like a nice post to revisit.

I remember reading it 8 months ago when it first came out but thought that I hadn’t written about it. After I wrote this post, I checked just to make sure and oops, I had written about it. Since the previous post seems a bit better written to me, I invite you to go read it and I’ll delete this version. Sorry for (my) confusion.

Jeremy Friesen, who is hosting this month’s Emacs Carnival, has his own offering for the Elevator Pitch. As I said before [1, 2] the elevator pitch is particularly difficult because you have to make a persuasive case for Emacs in the time it takes for an elevator ride.

Randy Ridenour and Álvaro Ramírez met that challenge by providing a single simple statement and a list of ways of using Emacs for surprising tasks, respectively. Friesen begins by listing a number of reasons that you might want to try Emacs and then starts asking questions of putative computer users about their current software.

The TL;DR of Friesen’s pitch is that while Emacs may look retro it’s really good at helping you tell your computer what to do. There is, he says, no need to try to do everything from the beginning. Better to just start with writing or reading documents and move on from there.

As with Ramirez’s post, Friesen injects a bit of humor regarding the absurdity of haranguing people in a elevator about something they’ve probably never heard of and certainly don’t care about. But the point of the exercise is to force you distill your reasons for being an Emacs user to their essence.

Álvaro Ramírez has weighed in on the Emacs Elevator Pitch challenge. Like Randy Ridenour’s response, Ramírez captures the spirit of the challenge perfectly. His answer is, to be sure, much longer than Ridenour’s but it’s easy to imagine it actually being delivered in an elevator.

Ramírez begins by saying that although Emacs seems like just an editor, it is, in fact, a portal to a world where everything works the way you want it to. He goes on to illustrate his point by presenting a long list of many of the things he’s done with Emacs. It’s a lengthy list. Just barely short enough to fit in a multi-floor elevator ride.

One of the things I liked about his list was that most of the items contained a link to the blog post that described that particular feature and how he implemented it. If you’re interested in small projects that leverage Emacs to accomplish some nominally non-editing function, Ramírez’s post serves as in index into those he’s done.

Finally, at the end of his post, Ramírez injects a bit of humor that neatly captures the absurdity of trying to make a case for Emacs in the time span of an elevator ride. Still, the challenge is interesting because it forces you to distill your reasons for loving Emacs to its essence.

Update [2025-08-22 Fri 11:04]: Added link to Ramírez’s post.