tvl-depot/users/tazjin/blog/posts/emacs-is-underrated.md

TIP: Hello, and thanks for offering to review my draft! This post intends to convey to people what the point of Emacs is. Not to convert them to use it, but at least with opening their minds to the possibility that it might contain valuable things. I don't know if I'm on track in the right direction, and your input will help me figure it out. Thanks!

TODO(tazjin): Restructure sections: Intro -> Introspectability (and story) -> text-based UIs (which lead to fluidity, muscle memory across programs and "translatability" of workflows) -> Outro. It needs more flow!

TODO(tazjin): Highlight more that it's not about editing: People can derive useful things from Emacs by just using magit/org/notmuch/etc.!

TODO(tazjin): Note that there's value in trying Emacs even if people don't end up using it, similar to how learning languages like Lisp or Haskell helps grow as a programmer even without using them day-to-day.

Real post starts below!

---

There are two kinds of people: Those who use Emacs, and those who think it is a text editor. This post is aimed at those in the second category.

Emacs is the most critical piece of software I run. My Emacs configuration has steadily evolved for almost a decade. Emacs is my window manager, mail client, terminal, git client, information management system and - perhaps unsurprisingly - text editor.

Before going into why I chose to invest so much into this program, follow me along on a little thought experiment:

---

Lets say you use a proprietary spreadsheet program. You find that there are features in it that almost, but not quite do what you want.

What can you do? You can file a feature request to the company that makes it and hope they listen, but for the likes of Apple and Microsoft chances are they won't and there is nothing you can do.

Let's say you are also running an open-source program for image manipulation. You again find that some of its features are subtly different from what you would want them to do.

Things look a bit different this time - after all, the program is open-source! You can go and fetch its source code, figure out its internal structure and wrangle various layers of code into submission until you find the piece that implements the functionality you want to change. If you know the language it is written in; you can modify the feature.

Now all that's left is figuring out its build system¹, building and installing it and moving over to the new version.

Realistically you are not going to do this much in the real world. The friction to contributing to projects, especially complex ones, is often quite high. For minor inconveniences, you might often find yourself just shrugging and working around them.

What if it didn't have to be this way?

---

One of the core properties of Emacs is that it is introspective and self-documenting.

For example: A few years ago, I had just switched over to using EXWM, the Emacs X Window Manager. To launch applications I was using an Emacs program called Helm that let me select installed programs interactively and press RET to execute them.

This was very useful - until I discovered that if I tried to open a second terminal window, it would display an error:

Error: urxvt is already running

Had this been dmenu, I might have had to go through the whole process described above to fix the issue. But it wasn't dmenu - it was an Emacs program, and I did the following things:

1. I pressed C-h k² (which means "please tell me what the following key does"), followed by s-d (which was my keybinding for launching programs).

2. Emacs displayed a new buffer saying, roughly:

   s-d runs the command helm-run-external-command (found in global-map),
   which is an interactive autoloaded compiled Lisp function in
   ‘.../helm-external.el’.
   
   It is bound to s-d.
   

   I clicked on the filename.

3. Emacs opened the file and jumped to the definition of helm-run-external-command. After a few seconds of reading through the code, I found this snippet:

   (if (get-process proc)
       (if helm-raise-command
           (shell-command  (format helm-raise-command real-com))
         (error "Error: %s is already running" real-com))
     ;; ... the actual code to launch programs followed below ...
     )
   

4. I deleted the outer if-expression which implemented the behaviour I didn't want, pressed C-M-x to reload the code and saved the file.

The whole process took maybe a minute, and the problem was now gone.

Emacs isn't just "open-source", it actively encourages the user to modify it, discover what to modify and experiment while it is running.

In some sense it is like the experience of the old Lisp machines, a paradigm that we have completely forgotten.

---

Circling back to my opening statement: If Emacs is not a text editor, then what is it?

The Emacs website says this:

[Emacs] is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing

The core of Emacs implements the language and the functionality needed to evaluate and run it, as well as various primitives for user interface construction such as buffers, windows and frames.

Every other feature of Emacs is implemented in Emacs Lisp.

The Emacs distribution ships with rudimentary text editing functionality (and some language-specific support for the most popular languages), but it also brings with it two IRC clients, a Tetris implementation, a text-mode web browser, org-mode and many other tools.

Outside of the core distribution there is a myriad of available programs for Emacs: magit (the famous git porcelain), text-based HTTP clients, even interactive Kubernetes frontends.

What all of these tools have in common is that they use text-based user interfaces (UI elements like images are used only sparingly in Emacs), and that they can be introspected and composed like everything else in Emacs.

If magit does not expose a git flag I need, it's trivial to add. If I want a keybinding to jump from a buffer showing me a Kubernetes pod to a magit buffer for the source code of the container, it only takes a few lines of Emacs Lisp to implement.

As proficiency with Emacs Lisp ramps up, the environment becomes malleable like clay and evolves along with the user's taste and needs. Muscle memory learned for one program translates seamlessly to others, and the overall effect is an improvement in workflow fluidity that is difficult to overstate.

Also, workflows based on Emacs are stable. Moving my window management to Emacs has meant that I'm not subject to the whim of some third-party developer changing my window layouting features (as they often do on MacOS).

To illustrate this: Emacs has development history back to the 1970s, continuous git history that survived multiple VCS migrations since 1985 (that's 22 years before git itself was released!) and there is code³ implementing interactive functionality that has survived unmodified in Emacs since then.

---

Now, what is the point of this post?

I decided to write this after a recent tweet by @IanColdwater (in the context of todo-management apps):

The fact that it's 2020 and the most viable answer to this appears to be Emacs might be the saddest thing I've ever heard

What bothers me is that people see this as sad. Emacs being around for this long and still being unparalleled for many of the UX paradigms implemented by its programs is, in my book, incredible - and not sad.

How many other paradigms have survived this long? How many other tools still have fervent followers, amazing developer tooling and a vibrant ecosystem at this age?

Steve Yegge said it best⁴: Emacs has the Quality Without a Name.

What I wish you, the reader, should take away from this post is the following:

TODO(tazjin): Figure out what people should take away from this post. I need to sleep on it. It's something about not dismissing tools just because of their age, urging them to explore paradigms that might seem unfamiliar and so on. Ideas welcome.

---

---

1. Wouldn't it be a joy if every project just used Nix? I digress ... ↩︎

2. These are keyboard shortcuts written in Emacs Key Notation. ↩︎

3. For example, functionality for online memes that wouldn't be invented for decades to come! ↩︎

4. And I really do urge you to read that post's section on Emacs. ↩︎