{"id":10050,"date":"2021-10-18T12:13:28","date_gmt":"2021-10-18T16:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10050"},"modified":"2021-10-18T12:13:28","modified_gmt":"2021-10-18T16:13:28","slug":"emacs-as-a-tool-for-scientists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=10050","title":{"rendered":"Emacs as a Tool for Scientists"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, John Kitchin tweeted<\/a> a pointer to the draft of a paper by
\nTimonthy Johnson that makes the case for Emacs as the<\/i> tool for scientists to organize and report their research. The paper, Emacs as a Tool for Modern Science<\/a>, contrasts the \u201cnormal\u201d way or organizing and conducting research to using Emacs for the same job.<\/p>\n

Whereas the normal procedure involves the use of multiple pieces of software, the Emacs method uses only a single program: Emacs. It\u2019s easy to take the attitude of \u2018Meh, so what?\u2019 but with Emacs, there is only one set of keystrokes to learn and there are no context switches as you move between different phases of a research project.<\/p>\n

Johnson also stresses the importance of persistence. When you use proprietary software, you are at the mercy of the vendor. They may go out of business, discontinue the product, or make non-backward compatible changes. With open source software, the user can always recover\u2014although perhaps not easily\u2014because the source is available. More importantly, with Emacs, everything is in plain text and readable with any editor.<\/p>\n

Finally, there is Org-mode. With Org, data and the calculations upon it can be embedded in the manuscript. That\u2019s a huge win for reproducible research and ensures that the results in the paper also reflect the latest version of the data and the calculations on it. It\u2019s also an easy way of generating LaTeX for submission to journals.<\/p>\n

All of these benefits are well-known to developers who use Emacs but many scientists are focused on their field of research and don\u2019t consider their tools. Mostly they use whatever tools they learned in grad school regardless of the tools\u2019 shortcomings. If you follow Emacs, you know there are exceptions like Kitchin and Eric Fraga<\/a>\u2014to name the first two to come to mind\u2014who have embraced the Emacs way in their research. Indeed, Kitchin has a similar paper<\/a> in ACS Catalysis<\/a> that makes analogous points.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written before about the use of Emacs in the humanities. Most of the same points apply. Really, if you\u2019re wrangling text or doing research, you should consider Emacs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, John Kitchin tweeted a pointer to the draft of a paper by Timonthy Johnson that makes the case for Emacs as the tool for scientists to organize and report their research. The paper, Emacs as a Tool for Modern … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18,4],"class_list":["post-10050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs","tag-org-mode"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10050"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10051,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10050\/revisions\/10051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}