Why Emacs?

What is Emacs?

GNU Emacs is a free and open source software.

The editing functionality of Emacs are written in Emacs Lisp—a dialect of the Lisp programming language (the rest of Emacs and its interpreter are written in C for performance).

Emacs is endlessly customizable to anyone with a basic knowledge of Emacs Lisp. In particular, variables and functions setting the behaviour and appearance of the text editor can be created or modified.

The language is well documented.

Why use Emacs?

To brag. Obviously.

But there are other reasons:

• Free and open source
• Endlessly customizable
• Amazing diff
• Macros
• Text and file searching
• Great programming IDE
• Lossless and endless undo/redo
• Email, Slack, Telegram, calendar
• Quick editing of file names and directories
• Unified set of shortcuts, search functionality, and environment for any tasks (easier than learning new IDEs and GUIs all the time!)
• Tetris!
• Fun!
• …

Now … getting started can be daunting …

… and it doesn’t necessarily get easier.

But it’s all worth it!