Comment by iLemming
20 hours ago
Younger folk and beginners keep ignoring Emacs (and Lisp in general), without the slightest attempt to even understand what kind of philosophy makes it appealing.
The profound difference lies in ontological fungibility – Emacs isn’t software you use, but cognitive clay that becomes an extension of your mind’s operating system. Where any specialized app is inevitably doomed to constrain you to some kind of constructed imagination of what note-taking/knowledge work should be, Emacs+Org erases the distinction between a tool and thought through radical philosophical pillars.
1. The Medium is the Message Paradox
Emacs rejects the app paradigm's fundamental axiom. Instead of being a "notes app" or "writing app", it's a meta-medium where:
- Your notes can spontaneously become a calendar event → spreadsheet formula → email draft → code compiler
- The act of writing is programming your environment (Org markup becomes executable functions)
- Tools aren't discrete entities but fluid expressions of your current mental state (e.g., I can run a shell command piping it to grep and then pipe the results into a text buffer)
1. Agency Through Textual Primordial Soup
By rooting everything in plain text + programmable buffers, you're working with the substrate of computation itself. Unlike database-driven apps that entomb your ideas in rigid schemas:
- Every thought remains perpetually protean – a TODO item can morph into a API documentation generator through markup alone
- You manipulate knowledge at the level of semantics (headings, tags, properties) rather than fighting GUI metaphors
- The friction between "taking notes" and "building systems" disappears – your journal entries are the configuration files of your life (I manage all my dotfiles — for Linux, Mac, home and work machines via Org-mode)
1. Compounding Selfhood
Specialized apps optimize for atomic efficiency; Emacs thrives on continuous identity investment. Each macro you write, each Org capture template, each minor mode becomes:
- A cognitive microhabitat that evolves with your thinking patterns
- Permanent infrastructure that pays compound interest (my 2010 Org config still works, while Evernote of 2010 is abandonware)
- A mirror of your epistemology – the keybindings/hierarchies are your neural pathways externalized
This creates an irreducible satisfaction: you're not just using tools but cultivating a personal universe where every interaction leaves permanent fertile ground for future growth. The specialized app user lives in rented apartments; the Emacs devotee walks through an ever-expanding mansion whose rooms rearrange themselves to their thoughts.
People definitely sleep on emacs, which is a shame, but I do get it. I switched to emacs fulltime for coding for my work a few years ago, and really had it tailored to my preferences but drift (that took just slightly too long for me to keep up with while on the job) combined with AI features in other editors led me to land on Zed for code, which saddened me but is probably the best fit for coding.
However, Org-Mode is seriously a killer feature that is well worth it on its own. I use emacs to handle all my finances, notes with org-roam, blogging with ox-hugo, dotfiles in a massive org-tangle document, etc. I couldn't find anything remotely to compare it to, and have failed attempts at switching. There are tons of ways of interacting with Emacs that are just lightyears ahead of anything else. Literate programming and tangle are a godsend for tons of different use cases for me as well. I even keep running notes in the base of my codebase so I can hop to various files and capture locations in the relevant files as links in notes.
The only pain point for these tools for me is trying to use them as part of a commandline integration. I really wish org-mode and org-roam's functions were callable outside of emacs, e.g. for automated document generation from org-mode. One of the most painful things I've had to setup is an org-roam-server integration that updates and deploys org-roam-server when the git repo containing its files is updated. Only way to do that seemingly is to run emacs in a very strange way inside of a docker image. Intuitively it feels like org-roam-server should be able to build itself into a static website for deployment. Might seem like a nitpick, but it's really not -- that interface is a huge part of why I use it and not being able to host it without horribly hacky workarounds seems like a massive weakness.
Which is why I've settled on neovim; I've written my code to be as modular as possible, so I can pull it in an CLI program if needs be.
Neovim is a text editor. You can't compare Emacs with just a text editor. Just like you can't compare Emacs with a browser, music player, note-taking app, email client, etc. Emacs, first and foremost, is a Lisp REPL, with an embedded text editor. Without deeply understanding and respecting this aspect it is difficult to appreciate what Emacs could be, what you can do with it.
Imagine this — one morning I was watching my colleague showing me a bunch of things over a Zoom video, and I didn't feel comfortable interrupting him with "wait, don't scroll away, I didn't get that, allow me to read it", "hold on, I'm taking notes", etc. I sacrificed my lunch break to write a small Elisp command that runs tesseract to OCR the image in the clipboard. Now, I don't even have to ask my colleagues for explanations or tell them to share the url they are currently browsing — I can just grab it with a couple of keystrokes to make a note. And that's just one, single, isolated example. It cost me twenty minutes of my time. Twenty minutes of investment that paid itself many times over already. And I have tons of similar examples.
(Long time Emacs user, abandoned since VSCode became a thing because it hurt my wrists so much.)
Do you think what you're talking about is hard to demo?
"- The act of writing is programming your environment (Org markup becomes executable functions)
- Tools aren't discrete entities but fluid expressions of your current mental state (e.g., I can run a shell command piping it to grep and then pipe the results into a text buffer)"
I haven't seen an impressive demo of this kind of stuff tbh.
No, it's not hard to demo, and I've been thinking about making some vids, but it's just difficult for me for multiple reasons. Besides, the whole topic feels too grandiose to cover easily and make it satisfying for every level of expertise — newbies and seasoned veterans.
I'm a regular dweller of https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx. We meet every first Wednesday of the month - if timezone permits it, come talk to us if you have specific questions. I will promise you though to make an effort to produce some demos and publish them.
> wrists
there is evil-mode, even mouse support ;-)
Did you use evil mode? I am basically just running Spacemacs and I don't often need to use ctrl and option most of the time by leveraging the modal editing.