Emacs Tutorial Series Promotion


Introduction

Text editors and IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) are software applications used for creating, editing, and managing text files, source code, and projects. They’re popular due to their versatility, customizability, and the efficiency they bring to various tasks.

There are many typical uses and user groups, such as:

Typical Uses:

  1. Coding and software development: Writing, debugging, and testing source code in various programming languages.
  2. Writing and documentation: Creating and editing documents, notes, and content for blogs, books, or technical documentation.
  3. Data analysis and science: Editing and managing data files, scripts, and notebooks for data analysis, machine learning, and visualization.
  4. Web development: Designing, coding, and testing web applications, websites, and web services.

Typical User groups:

  1. Software developers: Professional programmers, coders, and engineers.
  2. Technical writers: Authors, bloggers, and documentation specialists.
  3. Data scientists and analysts: Professionals working with data, machine learning, and visualization.
  4. Web developers: Designers, developers, and maintainers of web applications and websites.
  5. Power users: Advanced users who utilize text editors and IDEs for various tasks, such as scripting, automation, and system administration.

Here Are Some of the More Popular Text Editors:

  1. Visual Studio Code
  2. IntelliJ IDEA
  3. Visual Studio
  4. Eclipse
  5. Android Studio
  6. Xcode
  7. Sublime Text
  8. PyCharm
  9. NetBeans
  10. PhpStorm
  11. CLion
  12. Notepad++
  13. Emacs
  14. NeoVim
  15. Brackets
  16. BBEdit
  17. Nano
  18. TextEdit

Why Is Emacs Different?

Unlike many text editors, with the exception of VIM and its possibly more modern and popular fork NeoVIM, Emacs is often simplified to appear as a simple window on the screen, without complicated menus and technical boxes. This makes it conceptually easy to work with and contributes to its popularity.

Since 2019, Emacs posts on Reading World Magazine have had around 150,000 views. Even today, in the midst of the AI boom, 10 to 20 new visitors from around the world visit Reading World Magazines Emacs posts every day.

Emacs (1976) and Vi were the first IDE-like text editors, which may be why it’s popular among researchers in many of the world’s most renowned academic institutions. Possibly for this reason it’s one of the few text editors used outside of technical fields such as engineering and science.

Who Uses Emacs

In addition to techy people, here are some non-technical types of people who have been known to use Emacs:

[Note: Most people, including: skilled public speakers and business people don’t use Emacs. For example, sales people, marketing specialists, managers usually spend their time on other activities, such as building relationships with suppliers, staff, and customers.]

Musician Case Study

Pierce Wang is an example of a classical musician who use Emacs:

Here is his Emacs conference talk video:





Other Emacs Videos

Among the text editor scenes, the Emacs scene is known for having a bit of an eclectic crowd. Browse through some of the following talks if you’re interested in viewing some of the people who use Emacs.

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/ https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/ https://emacsconf.org/2022/talks/ https://emacsconf.org/2021/talks/ https://emacsconf.org/2020/talks/

What Do People Use Emacs for?

  1. Productivity

    • checking email
    • managing complex projects
    • to-do lists

  2. Writing and Editing

    • writing
    • editing
    • outlining

  3. Note-taking and Reflection

    • daily journals
    • note-taking
    • organizing thoughts
    • brainstorming

  4. Human-Computer Interaction

    • interacting with your computer
    • interacting with AI

How Does Emacs Improve Productivity So Much?

Emacs originally stood for macro, which is a series of key strokes that result in a multi-step computer operations. In my opinion, one of the biggest advantages of Emacs is a feeling of total control and proficiency when you are at the ‘helm’ of your computer.

I compare this proficiency with ‘playing’ your computer like a ‘piano.’

Not only does a high-level of proficiency with Emacs make computer work enjoyable, it improves productivity more than 10x. After mastering Emacs, you will achieve 10x more editor related work from the same effort, or the same amount of editor related work for 1/10 of the effort. Because of the organization benefits it brings, Emacs use also improves your productivity in non-text editor related areas.

Emacs is also a useful facilitator for working with your computer using voice commands. Voice LLM interactivity, the most advanced form of ‘vibe’ coding is going crazy this year, in terms of growth in products/libraries and various instruments. The productivity gains and ease-of-use anticipated from Emacs based voice controlled LLM interaction, using MCP tool servers, is out of this world.

Here are some key ways Emacs Boosts Productivity:

What Are Some Shortcomings of Emacs

Because Emacs is open-source, and evolved from an open-source community, it comes with the problem of a seemingly infinite choice of customizations and options. Also, the learning curve is notoriously ‘steep’, meaning ‘flat’; I’ve no idea why people say steep 😆.

In addition, to get it to the point where it can be used like most over-the-counter text-editors Emacs requires a significant amount of customization. While a knowledge workers’ ‘workshop’ built in Emacs is incredibly powerful, setting it up and getting proficient in it takes most people many years.

In my case, I first learned Emacs from an academic supervisor, while working as a consultant. He was also a consultant, who went on to be the Chair of Economics at ETH Zurich. Needless to say, I received excellent instruction.

However, it wasn’t until 2 years after first using Emacs that I started heavily customizing it. And it wasn’t until 10 years of using Emacs that I became what I consider for my skill-set highly-proficient in it.

Why A Build Hello Tutorial Series?

Over the years, I realized I have unique knowledge and skill that can lower the time to Emacs proficiency from 10 years to 2 years. That’s 6 months to get familiar with it and a year and half to master it. Considering how beneficial it is to me, improving my productivity by 10x and more than tripling the rate at which I learn new things, I believe if Emacs is learned in an intelligent way, the benefits of using it for anyone who writes things down are incredible.

Also, because of the way the world is going with AI, Emacs offers some unique opportunities for integration with multiple AI tools, while many editors and products focus on tools from only one provider.

What About Other Emacs Tutorial Series, Should I Watch Them?

Yes and No. Watching any Emacs tutorial is probably helpful in some way, but there are a HUGO amount of tutorials, and many are overly complicated, uncontextualized, missing information, and/or simply outdated. Moreover, the Youtube model promotes number of views, prompting some of the better tutorial providers, like System Crafters to produce a HUGO number of tutorials, making it unclear which tutorials to use, and how to use them, and pushing the time to proficiency up again.

From many of the free tutorials out there, I do recommend System Crafters tutorials. In this series, I will be recommending some of System Crafters tutorials for certain operations. Keep in mind however, System Crafters operates at a level of complexity that is higher than generally required.

Should I mention Emacs in my Interview for Microsoft, Amazon, or Apple.

Probably not. While of course many people in big organizations, like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Tesla use Emacs, VIM and NeoVim, it’s recommended to mention VS Code in any interview settings.

Okay, I’m ready to start learning Emacs, Where Should I start?

I’m currently putting together the first two mini-series of my Emacs tutorial series, ‘Building And Installing Emacs on Your Operating System’, and ‘Initializing and Using Emacs.’

To prepare for those Series I recommend watching the System Crafters tutorial: “Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Emacs.” Go ahead and install Emacs on your computer system and try it out. You can uninstall it and reinstall it when my first tutorial series comes out, or just use the installation you installed during the System Crafters video.

Here is the video followed by an AI generated bullet-point summarization.

The System Crafters Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Emacs | David Wilson

Installing Emacs

Graphical User Interface Mode vs Terminal Mode

Basic Concepts of Emacs

Modes

Windows and Frames

Frames

Other UI Elements

Frames

Buffers

Buffer Management

Mode Line

Echo Area and Mini Buffer

Commands

Key Bindings

Modes

Major Modes

Minor Modes

Examples of Modes in Action

Frames and Buffers

Key Bindings

Understanding Key Bindings

Modifier Keys

Complex Key Bindings

Key Bindings

Prefixes

Modes

Frames and Buffers

Cut, Copy, and Paste

Undo and Redo

Canceling Operations

Key Bindings

Help System

Init.el File