Every once in a while I come across a comment thread or an article that features ardent supporters of a forty+ year-old text editor known as Emacs. Today it happens to be a Hacker News thread discussing whether it’d be a good idea for the core group of Emacs contributors to go out of their way to make the editor more appealing to general users.
Reading through the subject of the thread, I get a sense that this desire is coming from a fear of being relegated to the annals of developer history while the younger cohorts click their mouses around in editors that don’t require interpreting an ancient scroll to become productive in.
But is it really worth going out of their way to push Emacs to more users rather than focusing on the needs of the existing (albiet small) userbase?
I plan on finding out.
Emacs for the average software developer
I am your perfectly average, yet capable developer. My editor of choice is VSCode and I use the Synthwave theme because I like to pretend I’m in a cyberpunk fantasy world working on problems larger than pulling data from one system and pushing it into another.
Now, I am not completely new to Emacs. My first year in college I had an “internship” working with a bioinformatics grad student who basically just babysat me and told me to use Perl+Emacs to figure out how to parse some arcane bioinformatics data. That was the extent of my instruction while he focused on his research and coursework during our time together. But this summer did teach me C-f, C-b, C-a, and C-e which I use to this day. Could this type of shortcut be what the Emacs greybeards are feeling times 1000 for all of the capabilities they’ve wrangled out of it?
I’m pretty sure there is more to editors than being really really ridiculously good looking. And I plan on finding out what that is.
And with that comes my self imposed challenge; to use Emacs as my primary editor for 30 days, and decide for myself if I think it is worth looking into for an “average” developer. And this will be starting with vanilla Emacs! I know there are variants floating around out there but I want to start with the pure experience and add on as I go.
If anybody has any tips to make the transition easier I welcome them!
