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SL / EN

Recommending Emacs
EmacsCarnival: Newbies/Starter kits

Submission to the Emacs Carnival theme of April 2026: Newbies/Starter kits.

I've been mostly unsuccessful with recommending Emacs to other people. They usually don't share my enthusiasm, find my explanation of benefits Emacs brings too abstract or just lose interest after they are not able to configure something in a way that they wanted too. The latter is usually the case, but I also had one successful conversion from Vim to Emacs, and I'm going to shortly mention it, before I speak about my greatest Emacs recommendation failure.

The Clash of Text Editors

I've met my partner in crime, later also my co-host of the monthly tech-critical radio show Techno Enema, on a leftist youth camp we organized with our student organization Spark, and we shared a common interest in Free and Open Source Software. In the student organization we had a working group for technology where we studied political aspects of FLOSS (one text that we read was The Telekommunist manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner) and we studied the technology as well in order to empower and emancipate us in its usage.

Few years later, after I left that student organization I joined the Radio Student and worked at the editorial of current affairs, but I was very interested in intersection of technology and politics (and IT itself as well). So when the idea to have our own radio show started to form, we first had something like an "open" program called The Clash of Text Editors (Jurij was Vim user at that time) where we were exchanging jokes on our favorite text editors. You can listen to the radio program at the link I provided, but it is in Slovene. I didn't know a lot about Vim at that time, but I was quite confident that it was more capable than Vim and far more extendable. Which, in the end, proved to be right, since Jurij tried out Emacs shortly after and stuck with it. Ten years after, Jurij is now a regular member of Emacs User Group Slovenia meetups.

Believing everyone will just love Emacs (as I do)

While I was attending faculty, I had a great Emacs setup for course Model analysis where we had weekly assignments to solve an open-ish problem with different numerical method, learn the method and write a report about the problem. I had Emacs split in 3 windows, with the main window for programming in Python or writing a report in LaTeX and two vertically split windows with Python shell to run program and shell for building the LaTex and gnuplot graphs. I was very happy with the setup, and it was efficient and elegant.

With that enthusiasm I've advised my girlfriend to use Emacs to write her thesis in Org Mode and then export it to either PDF or RST. She did not like it all and did not find the motivation to explore what Emacs provide, learn and memorize the functions. She prefers WYSIWYG editing. It was very cumbersome for her to write her thesis, and she is determined not to use Emacs anymore.

This was an important lesson to me as well. Since then, I was not so enthusiastic in my recommendation of Emacs (although I'm still totally enthusiastic about Emacs itself :).

There was also a period at the IT department of our radio to use a FOSS text editor, basically using VSCode was discouraged, but adoption of Emacs (or Vim) was not very well accepted. I think people were mostly missing the curiosity to explore what Emacs provides.

Adopting Emacs is hard, Failure is discouraging

Coming back to the radio show, since me and Jurij were both Emacs users we were looking for a way to prepare show in Emacs. This meant to gather sources, do the (journalistic) research, have a short to-do list, have an overview of communication with potential guests and write a scenario. Real-time collaborative environment with Org Mode would be ideal for that. Sadly, the only option we found at that time was floobits, which seems is discontinued now. We tried out the free version, and it was buggy and Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (crdt) functionality was frequently breaking so we decided to use Etherpad (hosted at riseup.net) in the end. We moved to the HedgeDoc (hosted by Kompot) since then. Emacs now has quite stable option for crdt.el, but we're softly locked out of using it, since we don't run accessible Emacs service on a server with crdt, and a co-host that joined recently doesn't use Emacs.

This example shows how harder adoption might also lock you out of the service in the longer term. To be fair, Emacs wasn't ready for the task at that time, it was around ten years ago, but now it is and the specter of the past is still holding us in its grips. Instead of superior Org Mode, we are writing Markdown.

I still feel like a newbie

After almost 20 years of using Emacs, I still often feel like a newbie. I have big plans of organizing my life in Emacs and move all my web development work into Emacs. We'll see how it goes. 

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