Re: what keeps you coming back to Emacs?

The following is part of a private exchange. I am publishing it with permission, without disclosing the identity of my correspondent.

I hope you don’t mind me asking but what keeps you coming back to Emacs? I am currently wondering whether to look at Neovim again - it does seem to be faster and with a strong community around it. I love Emacs and its community but from time to time wonder whether I am on the wrong side of Lisp vs Lua for example in the case of Neovim for performance, simplicity, modernity, etc.

What is your driver to work so hard in Emacs, Prot?

I come from a background of using the command line, all sorts of terminal-based programs like Mutt and Newsboat, Tmux, Vim, and a tiling window manager. None of those tools speak the same language. To make them work in concert, you have to know many programming and/or configuration paradigms. Just to get the same theme everywhere is a pain: try to configure Taskwarrior, Newsboat, Mutt, MPC, Vim, Tmux, i3, and friends to get an idea. Then try to set a high contrast light theme in the terminal to notice how hard-coded assumptions will break your workflow (e.g. the ‘apt’ program’s progress bar, or the tabs and borders of ‘htop’). Plus, you are confined to a terminal emulator, whose typographic capabilities are limited, such that you cannot have fonts of varying widths and heights (maybe there are terminals that do this nowadays, though XTerm, ST, and those based on VTE did not cover all my needs pre-2019).

Emacs provides the missing layer of interactivity on top of Unix. We have a highly capable programming language (Emacs Lisp) to configure all parts of our computing environment in a uniform fashion. If you know how to write a function or set a variable for task management, you know how to do it for email, and for writing or coding, et cetera. The skills you acquire as you gain more experience with Emacs have a compounding effect. You eventually get more out of the time you invest in them, which practically means that you are empowered to design the workflow you want and be as opinionated as you like with your tool.

I am not a programmer by training and did not have any formal education in this or related fields: I studied politics for the most part. I also was not a tech kid: I got my first computer in my mid-20s. Emacs’ introspectability has helped me learn how to program by playing around with Elisp. It is so easy to find some code that is of immediate interest to you, tweak it, evaluate it, and check its new behaviour live. Take, for example, the command that shows you which command a key is bound to: describe-key. It produces a Help buffer that includes a link to the source code. Follow the link and you are reading the actual code. From there it is only a matter of time and practice until you get the hang of it and start tweaking things to work the way you want.

Emacs is a tool with high pedagogical potential because it is a sandbox that enables experimentation. The feedback loop between test and results is short and intuitive. If I, as a humanities person and philosopher, am able to learn Elisp and write lots of Emacs packages, I can only imagine what a skilled programmer or engineer will be capable of.

To the point of how didactic Emacs is, consider that once you learn to define a function with defun and make it interactive with the (interactive) spec, it is trivial to write your first “extension” in Elisp. For example:

Use describe-key to find which command is bound to the down arrow key.
Read the documentation that pops up.
Now write an interactive function that goes down 15 lines.
Write another that goes up 15 lines.

[ These are actually the first functions I remember writing. ]

There you have it: you are programming in Emacs Lisp!

This introspectability—and the immediacy of the experience—is helpful to beginners and veterans alike. Whenever an expert wants to extend or intercept a function or parts thereof, they rely on what they had learnt while they were still a newcomer, adding to it as they go.

Not to imply that only coders benefit from Emacs though (most of what I do is prose, anyway). One can be productive without ever writing their own custom snippets of Elisp. For instance, I handle my email in Emacs. I can just call org-store-link to capture a link to the message I am reading and then insert that link in some task that shows up on my agenda (or use org-capture to streamline this process). When I follow the link, it opens my actual email client and I can review what the exchange was about. These linkages are possible because of the unified computing environment I mentioned earlier. This same pattern applies in other contexts as well. And it is all plain text, which is consistent with Emacs’ spirit of hackability/introspectability.

The technical merits of Emacs are numerous, though I must also stress its moral quality as free software. To my mind, Emacs is the embodiment of the four essential software freedoms: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html. It does not give us freedom in some vague sense, but in the practical way of introspectability and extensibility. We not only study the program, but also modify it in real time. Emacs is thus an example to follow for how to empower users to be free and how to teach them to seek freedom wherever possible. Even the intangibles, such as how you are incentivised to make Emacs your own, underpin the ethos of freedom and the fact of diversity.

Is Emacs perfect? Of course not. There are lots of changes that can be made. Though we must remember that this is a community of volunteers. To have what we want at the technical level, we must do the requisite work at the interpersonal level: to ensure that there is a thriving and welcoming milieu from where innovation will come.

In conclusion then, I use Emacs as it is technically superior to what I was using before. The more I learn, the better my Emacs becomes. This is the gift that keeps giving. I also use Emacs because I care about software freedom and want to do my part in inspiring others to be more free.