My Elevator Pitch for Emacs

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So, as we are already stuck in this non-free elevator, let me tell you something.

Imagine, that all your expectations from a text editor are too low. You often have various basic features: you can write and edit text, save and load documents. Sometimes you have more advanced features: code completion, code highlighting, snippets, some integration with terminal. Oh, and in some cases you even have plugins - which can introduce more features and extend the functionality to some extent.

But what if I told you, that this is too basic?

Why to use other text editors, when you could use GNU Emacs? Which is, as its site states, "At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing."

Yeah, and that is 100% true.

It is extensible to the point of changing nearly all functionality to make it act up to your weirdest expectations. And spend on its configuration the same time you would have spent on configuration of your operating system all together (from scratch). It is not an editor, it is mostly a way of doing things.

You will not get used to workflows not suitable for you - you definetly will learn Emacs Lisp bit by bit to start hacking on these workflows.

Of course, Emacs can do everything even slightly related to text:

  • You could organize your whole life with the Org-mode
  • Maintain interconnected knowledge database with Org Roam
  • Maintain and listen your music collection using EMMS
  • Chat with geeky friends and communities in ERC
  • Chat with less geeky friends in Telegram using Telega
  • Manage your Email using mu4e or Gnus (if you are brave enough)

Huh, pretty long list already, isn't it?

And, of course, you could have a code higlighting and LSP integration for nearly every language (not everything is working perfectly, but who cares?)

And all of these absolutely hackable, even in runtime!

If you get used to Emacs Lisp (and you will), after some time you will notice a lack of customization in any other text editor - plugins and extensions are too constrained, while with Emacs Lisp you could change nearly anything in Emacs logic.

If you still cannot fulfill your hacking expectations - full source code of GNU Emacs is available and mailing list is as friendly and welcoming as it could be.

Come on, give it a try, and your life will never be the same!

And don't be so serious.