Emacs is a brilliant tool that can do just about anything. It’s a powerful development environment, an extensible Lisp interpreter, and even a great media player. I have been using Emacs for a while and I absolutely love it. Here are some of the reasons why I use Emacs in Linux, and why you should make it your text editor of choice too.
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- 1. It Allows Me to Integrate My Current Workflow
- 2. Easy to Learn for Non-Programmers and Beginners
- 3. Emacs is Available on All My Devices
- 4. Easy to Personalize and Highly Customizable
- 5. Plain Text Is a First-Class Citizen in Emacs
1. It Allows Me to Integrate My Current Workflow
The biggest reason why I started using Emacs is that it accommodates my entire personal workflow in a single program. Before, I used two to three apps just to manage my notes, drafts, and schedules. With Emacs, I can use its Org Mode feature to create a single .org file that can handle all three tasks at once.
Aside from that, some programs also include an Emacs extension that can directly plug into the editor. For example, my finance tracking app, Ledger, has its own “ledger-mode” plugin that adds automatic reporting and syntax highlighting to Emacs. This allowed me to streamline my finance tracking workflow and made it easier to record my finances.
Another way that Emacs integrates itself into my workflow is through Eshell. It’s a lightweight terminal emulator that runs under Emacs, similar to the Terminal app in GNOME. I find this especially useful since I can immediately run the programs and tools I’m writing about without leaving my text editor.
On a side note: looking to spice up your terminal? Check out 8 useful and interesting Bash prompts for your shell today.
2. Easy to Learn for Non-Programmers and Beginners
One of my pet peeves with text editors is that they are usually difficult to get into as a beginner. The biggest example that comes to mind is Vim’s “editor modes.” It is a system so obtuse that we wrote a dedicated article that goes through the different ways you can exit Vim.
In contrast, Emacs uses a graphical “non-modal” system for shortcuts. This is similar to Microsoft Word and Google Docs, where you press a modifier and a key to access a particular function.
Personally, I prefer this over modal editors since it gives me the flexibility to do different actions without losing the context of what I’m currently doing. For instance, I can edit an article, press Ctrl + H to do a quick documentation search, and immediately go back to writing.
3. Emacs is Available on All My Devices
As a technology writer, I often find myself hopping between different OSes, Linux distros, and CPU architectures when testing programs and trying out new tech. Because of that, any app that I include in my toolkit need to be able to cope with that demand and seamlessly work with little to no downtime.
Out of all the text editors I’ve used over the years, none comes as close to being universally portable as Emacs. I can run it on my Linux desktop, Mac laptop, Windows VM, and even my Android phone.
This level of portability gives me two advantages. First, I’m able to have my familiar Emacs environment almost anywhere I want, making my entire workflow independent of the hardware I’m currently using. Second, with Emacs’ TRAMP mode, I can access any filesystem in my Tailscale network, allowing me to work on my articles immediately from anywhere.
4. Easy to Personalize and Highly Customizable
Another frustration I have with modern text editors is that they often provide little to no avenues for customization. While some might include a handful of color and icon tweaks, these are either hard-coded or change very little on the overall look and feel of the editor.
Emacs solves this by making it easy to modify almost every graphical element in the text editor. I find this approach appealing since it allows me to experiment with ergonomic color schemes and layouts. For instance, my current Emacs “theme” is a stripped-down version of the editor with high color contrast between different GUI elements.
On top of that, extensions can also spice up Emacs’ look and feel by adding features that aren’t present in the default setup. Personally, I use both “olivetti-mode” and “focus-mode” to create a distraction-free environment when writing articles.
Good to know: learn some of the best Emacs packages for productivity.
5. Plain Text Is a First-Class Citizen in Emacs
Being a long-time Linux user, I’ve come to love and appreciate the beauty of plain text. It’s simple enough that any app should be able to read it and versatile enough that you can use it for gluing programs together with UNIX pipes and Bash code.
Emacs is one of the few apps today that still treats plain text as a “first-class citizen.” It doesn’t store or transmit any of its data in a binary format, meaning that you can take the data from one Emacs package and use it as input to another.
In my case, I use this handy feature for sending myself emails about my Git commits using Magit and Notmuch, as well as moving data between Elfeed and Org Mode when taking notes on the interesting RSS feeds I come across.
Ultimately, Emacs is a powerful text editor that’s both adaptable and stable. It’s easy to pick up, and offers customization options for beginners and power users. As such, I fully recommend Emacs to anyone looking for a free and open-source cross-platform text editor. Start your journey today by installing a prebuilt distro such as Doom Emacs.
Image credit: Sameer via Unsplash and Wikimedia Commons. All alterations and screenshots by Ramces Red.
Ramces Red –
Staff Writer
Ramces is a technology writer that lived with computers all his life. A prolific reader and a student of Anthropology, he is an eccentric character that writes articles about Linux and anything *nix.
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