Irreal

As I mentioned last week, this month’s Emacs Carnival challenge is to make an elevator pitch for Emacs. It’s a pretty tough assignment. Realistically, you have less than a minute to convince your captive audience that they should give Emacs a try. I’m not sure I’d be up to it.

We do, however, have two bloggers willing to try. Christian Tietze and Jakub Nowak have each offered their take on the matter. Although they use slightly different approaches, their pitches are remarkably similar. They both emphasize that with Emacs you get a uniform interface and a minimum of context switching. Rather than dealing with separate applications and their different interfaces for your tasks, you can bring the majority of them under the Emacs umbrella and enjoy a single interface for all of them.

There are menus if you want them but, for me, a chief strength is that you can do everything without using a mouse. After all, Emacs was developed for use on a terminal long before the ascendancy of mice.

It’s interesting to me that both Tietze and Nowak chose to stress interface consistency. It is, for sure, an important aspect of Emacs use but, surely, there are more important aspects to discuss. The problem is that it’s hard to discuss those other aspects in the time required for an elevator ride. Perhaps interface consistency and lack of context switching is the best approach.

I’d guess that most people don’t think much about different interfaces and context switching until someone points the problem out to them. Perhaps that makes them a good elevator pitch. What do you think?

I wear T-shirts pretty much exclusively but I don’t have any Emacs T-shirts. The designs just don’t appeal to me. Charles Choi to the rescue. I really like the first two.

Choi generated them with Gemini as a lark so they’re not really available but I’m sure it would be easy to get some made by providing the images to any of several companies that silk screen T-shirts.

Regardless, this is just a quick, whimsical post to help you get over hump day

This is another post about the Emacs Carnival on Writing. This time it concerns a contribution by Randy Ridenour, a Philosophy Professor at Oklahoma Baptist University. I especially like stories like his because he’s a non-technical user who nevertheless made the effort to learn Emacs and bend it to his will.

You can read about his editor journey here but the interesting part, for me, is in his Emacs Writing Carnival post. If you read his previous post about his editor journey, you’ll see that he’s tried a (surprising) number of different editors but has settled on Emacs.

It was not love a first sight. Like many of us, he flirted with Emacs but had problems with it so he moved on but he kept hearing Emacs’ siren song and eventually returned. Later, he wrote his Emacs Carnival post in which he revisited his original objections to Emacs and why they no longer apply.

He notes that the mistake he made in his earlier rejection of Emacs was to think of it as just another editor that expected you to adapt to its way of doing things. Emacs, of course, is not like that. It’s often described as an editor kit or as editor building material. Once he realized that, Ridenour made his peace with Emacs and has been a faithful user for more than a decade.

He also discusses the difficulties in publishing as an Emacs using, liberal arts professor: Your end product must be submitted as a Word document. That’s not too bad when you’re a solo author because you can write in Org and export to Docx but when you have coauthors—who are almost certainly not Emacs users—sooner or later you have to descend into the seventh circle of editors and use Word or one of its siblings.

If you enjoy hearing about how others use Emacs, take a look at Ridenour’s post.

After the really great July Emacs Carnival on the writing experience hosted by Greg Newman, Jeremy Friesen has stepped up to host the August carnival. This month the subject is “The Emacs Elevator Pitch”. The idea is that you have a captive audience in an elevator for the short time it takes the elevator to get to its destination and you have to explain why they should be using Emacs.

There’s some latitude. As Friesen says, maybe the elevator is just going to the next floor so your time is severely limited. But maybe it gets stuck so you can harangue your audience for the time it takes for the maintenance people to rescue you all from the elevator.

Regardless, you have some limited time to convince people they should be using Emacs. What would you say? What reasons would you offer that taking the time and making the effort to learn Emacs is a worthwhile endeavor?

My own thoughts are that Emacs is a wide ranging program that does many things and can be used in many ways. I’m not sure that I could form a convincing argument “in 25 words or less” as the TV contest ads used to say. In any event, it will be interesting to see what people come up with. If you have some ideas about the matter, write them up and let Friesen know.