I’ve worked in this building a long time. I’ve heard a lot of pitches on this elevator. TextMate. Sublime. Atom. Sometimes they name them after people, like Joe or Sam. I had a French one just the other day. Claude? Maude? No matter. There’ll be a new one next week.
Want my advice? Invest in what’s proven to last. Text. Lisp. Open source. Emacs can read yesterday’s formats, be reprogrammed for today’s needs, and will still be licensed for your use tomorrow.
No two Emacs will be the same, just as no two users are the same. Like a true GNUerilla fighter, it will adapt to its surroundings, navigate the jungle of plain text and text-based protocols, fight against counter-revolutionary binary files. One Emacs can fight like a hundred other programs, whether they call themselves text editors, IDEs, email clients,2 RSS readers,3 video editors,4 or even “operating systems.”5
And I part with saying that Emacs is a tool that rewards practice, I tried to pick it up twice before the third time. And it was once I started practicing that it stuck.”
Emacs is a piece of software with a “killer feature” around every corner, but consistency and portability is without question the one that I believe stands before the rest. Even org .
This didn’t come out of the box but I was able to configure Emacs to do it for me. Not always easy, but always possible. I get an idea of something I want and then make Emacs work the way I want to.
If you are frustrated by computer interfaces becoming increasingly dumbed down;
If you’re up to challenging yourself with a system that provides endless room to grow and learn, and consistency over time so that what you learn isn’t made obsolete by each update;
If you’d like to see an alternate reality of computing, to experience how computer usage might have evolved differently if a different group of people and a different way of thinking had dominated;
And most of all, if you’d like to gain from that system and its different way of thinking a number of superpowers that will astonish anyone who looks over your shoulder…