{"id":9986,"date":"2021-09-19T12:06:25","date_gmt":"2021-09-19T16:06:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=9986"},"modified":"2021-09-19T12:06:25","modified_gmt":"2021-09-19T16:06:25","slug":"embracing-the-emacs-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=9986","title":{"rendered":"Embracing the Emacs Way"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019re looking for an introduction to The Way of Emacs<\/a>, there\u2019s a long article that explores the Emacs way and why it\u2019s worthwhile embracing despite what seems, at first, to be a formidable learning curve. There are a couple of major themes:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Emacs as a framework providing a huge number of functionalities including such non-editor tasks as playing music, reading and writing email, reading RSS feeds, displaying and annotating PDF files, reading ebooks, and much, much more.<\/li>\n
  2. Emacs as a philosophy: freedom, longevity, and even minimalism.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The article\u2019s (unnamed) author uses a wide swath of Emacs functionality including Org-mode, Magit, Tramp, Dired, Mu4e, Org-roam, Nov.el, EMMS, Daemon mode, password management, REPL modes, and more. The article is a good introduction to the things you can do from within Emacs. After you read it, you\u2019ll know why so many of us never want to leave Emacs.<\/p>\n

    He also makes the point that Emacs is becoming a rarity in today\u2019s software world. There\u2019s no subscription model, no user lock-in, no planned obsolescence, and most importantly, your data remains your data. It\u2019s all held locally and is in plain text. Even if Emacs magically disappeared, you\u2019d still have access to your data using any other editor or even simply spooling it to the screen. Compare that to, say, Google Docs. Even if you manage to avoid getting your account closed for some unspecified violation of the ever shifting code of conduct, you\u2019ll still lose your data when Google tires of maintaining the editor and sunsets it.<\/p>\n

    The longevity of Emacs is indisputable. It\u2019s one of the oldest applications still in wide use. Those who don\u2019t know what they\u2019re talking about are fond of mocking Emacs as old technology of no current relevance. What they mean is it doesn\u2019t have enough bling for them and isn\u2019t mouse\/menu driven. Meanwhile, Emacs is undergoing continuous development and constantly introducing technologies\u2014Magit, Org, e.g.\u2014that are shamelessly copied by all the \u201cmodern\u201d editors. When we Emacsers hear this nonsense, we just smile and get on with our work using Emacs.<\/p>\n

    If you\u2019re not an Emacs user and want your eyes opened, take a look at this article.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    If you\u2019re looking for an introduction to The Way of Emacs, there\u2019s a long article that explores the Emacs way and why it\u2019s worthwhile embracing despite what seems, at first, to be a formidable learning curve. There are a couple … 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],"class_list":["post-9986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9986","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=9986"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9986\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9987,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9986\/revisions\/9987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}