I lived in Emacs for most of my professional live, but IDEs and now Claude have taken over. Sad, but perhaps justified? Back in my academia days, there was much less pressure to use a uniform tech setup across staff, so people were happily using Emacs, or vim, or whatever -- and frankly, there was never any issue because of that.
But I can see there is a value (mostly for the admins, but also for debugging if you work collaboratively in a team) in enforcing the same setup for everyone. Sigh. Strangely, I could never convince my coworkers to ditch their IDEs for Emacs.
100% completely opposite experience. Emacs is hands down the king of any kind of text-manipulation. And not only on the composition side. Most editors and IDEs are focused on the composition side of things - making text, adjusting text, amending text. And code btw, is nothing but structured text.
Emacs opens gates for text consumption - I'm reading this entire HN thread in Emacs, just like I consume Jira, Slack, Telegram, Reddit; control YT vids, my browser tabs and history, etc. I search through Splunk and Datadog logs, Wiktionary entries and just general googling - all done in Emacs. I browse million-line codebases on GH without ever having to clone them. If there's a piece of any kind of text in the computational vicinity to my active Emacs instance - this laptop and all connectable devices, I can easily make use of it.
And this gets incredibly important in the age of LLMs. I can read, manipulate, navigate, search through, diff, sort, group, slice, dice, salt and pepper any kind of text. Give me just about any other editor instead and I immediately will feel handicapped.
IDEs that are not malleable (by design) are at an exact disadvantage. I can change any aspect of my editor in the middle of typing this very comment without ever losing the state, the context, or my mental focus. No IDE even hypothetically capable of doing any of that.
Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you re: text manipulation. That's exactly why I find it so frustrating that it's basically frowned upon in my current job. I do use it still, but must do so pretty much secretly at work.
At home, it's a different story.
I believe, Emacs is considered unprofessional in a lot of places?!
> Emacs is considered unprofessional in a lot of places
What? Why? Who the hell would ever forbid anyone from using a tool that literally makes them more productive? I mean, as the Russians say: "If drinking vodka at work interferes with your job, quit drinking vodka... at that job"
The main argument is that having the same setup on all work stations makes maintenance easier for the sysadmins and you don't run into inconsistencies between developers that only come about as a result of different setups.
Emacs is considered unprofessional in unprofessional work places.
Dictating specific tools without a very strong technical justification is a strong signal that your management doesn’t trust you to make any important decisions.
It absolutely is. Consider this. I'm reading this thread in Emacs. Why? Am I obsessed with it? What's the point? Well, I can easily read not just the thread but also the article posted while ignoring all the fluff - graphics, banners, ads, etc. - to extract a piece of plain text.
I can also just ignore every conversation - sometimes, posted urls are more valuable than what people blabber and fight about. Imagine having to extract all the urls on the page. Some might say: "Hey, there's a browser extension for that", but...
a) the extension has its own keybindings, dissimilar UI, etc.
b) it won't ignore HN's internal URLs, so you still need to grab the list of URLs and then remove the ones you don't need in... your editor. So why not just use that, to begin with?
In Elisp, it's a one-liner. You can bind it to a key. I can also utilize sparse tree search, e.g., to collapse everything while leaving every reply that contains a keyword. With imenu, I can jump to any thread. With indirect buffers, I can compare two parts sitting on opposite ends of the discussion. I can narrow to any point, add some text, and then send a request to an LLM.
And guess what? All these things are still the same for a Reddit discussion. So when I use it in Emacs, I can still use the same ways of manipulating and extracting value.
But I can see there is a value (mostly for the admins, but also for debugging if you work collaboratively in a team) in enforcing the same setup for everyone. Sigh. Strangely, I could never convince my coworkers to ditch their IDEs for Emacs.