TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

GNU Emacs

Score8 out of 10

11 Reviews and Ratings

Get a Demo

What is GNU Emacs?

GNU Emacs is described as a free extensible and customizable text editor for the Lisp programming language.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about GNU Emacs.
View all reviews

Still useful after all these years.

Incentivized
Kaleb-John LooView profile
Senior Firmware Engineer in Engineering at Spirent Communications (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Fast
  • Syntax highlighting

Cons

  • Shortcuts are not standard.
  • Sometimes certain key combinations puts it into an unfamiliar state.

Return on Investment

  • Emacs is free to use.
  • Most firmware and electrical engineers are familiar with Emacs making it easy to set up new employees to immediately start working.

Alternatives Considered

Vim

Other Software Used

Vim, GitHub, Oracle VM VirtualBox

Emacs, everything you need but the kitchen sink!

Incentivized
Jan PetersonView profile
Senior DevOps Architect in Information Technology at Lendio (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Emacs is exceptionally good at editing files. The various modes available allow customization of things like indentation, color schemes, etc. when editing different types of files.
  • Tramp mode in Emacs allows transparent editing of files on remote systems, including using sudo for access to secured files. As far as I know, no other tool does this as well.
  • Emacs's integration with Git is very useful when it comes to determining what changed and when. Git plugs into Emacs's generic SCM functionality, which means you get a ton of features for free, including Ediff for change management (so you can see what changed between two revisions of a file).
  • Integration with my web browser through the Edit with Emacs Chrome extension allows me to use a full editor when composing a post on a web page. This allows me to run various tools (such as spell checker, etc.) when composing on a web page in a text area.

Cons

  • Emacs is old, so it's a little crufty and not too easy to pick up and start using. There is a community package called Spacemacs that simplifies a lot of things that you do with Emacs. It is probably better suited to beginners.
  • Sometimes, the choices that were made to integrate certain functionality change the basic models for that functionality. This is seen primarily in the version control system support, where multiple version control systems are supported and "unified" to a standard Emacs-y way of doing things. This can be confusing to the new user not familiar with the Emacs way.
  • Emacs has, as its foundation, a lisp interpreter. This means that the extension language for Emacs is emacs-lisp. Some people find lisp hard to understand and have difficulties writing Emacs extension code, or understanding existing code.

Return on Investment

  • Overall, the ROI of Emacs has stemmed around its nature as a free, open source product. Usability is high, so when you use it you are more productive, but if you are unfamiliar with it, you will be less productive to start.
  • Emacs is more than just an IDE. It includes IDE-like functionality, but it is really much more than an IDE.
  • Emacs makes it easy for me to work in my environment, in a fashion to which I have become accustomed over the last 30+ years. It is more suited to the professional who has used it before.

Alternatives Considered

Eclipse, Vim, IntelliJ IDEA, Visual Studio IDE and PyCharm

Other Software Used

Chrome DevTools, Slack, Enpass

GNU Emacs - Swiss army knife of organization and text tools.

Incentivized
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • GNU Emacs is a text editor that can do almost anything that you want to do with it. It is fairly easy to extend the functionality using Emacs Lisp with a large library available.
  • It can be easily customized using themes as well as custom code to change the look and feel as well as how everything works.

Cons

  • There is a bit of a learning curve for Emacs. In order to use it most efficiently, it takes a little time to learn the Emacs way, as well as learning the keyboard commands for everything. Many things can be done from the menu, but the keyboard is really most efficient.
  • Customizing and extending Emacs is done with Emacs Lisp. While very flexible, Lisp is a bit different programming language than many people are used to.

Return on Investment

  • Emacs is free software, there is no cost at all.
  • It has helped tremendously in situations where many, or large, log files need to be searched.

Alternatives Considered

Notepad++ and OneNote

Other Software Used

OneNote, VIPRE

Emacs for all your editing needs

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Readily available: Emacs is available on almost all operating systems. You can use it for free, and even use it for remote editing. It has a nice desktop application that anyone can use, even the ordinary user.
  • Lightweight application: Although it hasn't always been, Emacs is now a very lightweight, efficient editor that isn't going to demand much CPU power. This can be crucial for large-scale applications.
  • Easy learning curve: for complex editors, Emacs is one of the easier to get a handle on. There's good documentation, and an easy layout that makes figuring out how it works much easier than others.

Cons

  • Initial startup time: not that it matters greatly, but Emacs can take a while on initial startup. But since it only happens once, it's not a huge deal.
  • Discovery of features: there are a lot of features to Emacs! But finding what all Emacs can do can take you some time. You'll still find new features on occasion even as a seasoned user.

Return on Investment

  • Organization: Emacs makes it easy to keep our projects organized, which is always important. It helps you have cleaner, more efficient code.
  • Efficiency: Since Emacs is so customizable and programmable, we've found it helps increase our efficiency by utilizing macros or programmed features!
  • Productivity: Because of the high efficiency of using Emacs, our productivity has boosted. I'd expect to find the same after beginning use of Emacs elsewhere

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Other Software Used

Atom, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, Notepad++