Emacs for all your editing needs
April 12, 2019
Emacs for all your editing needs
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with GNU Emacs
Emacs isn't used universally at my place of work, though it's one of the better options for editors readily available to us. Certain teams use it depending on their needs, and some use others for theirs. There are no restrictions or requirements as to what editor we use. The business problem it solves is just having a good editor that can be counted on for large and small scale use.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
Of course, Vim is a good contender for comparison as well, so I'll include it. I find Emacs much easier to learn, which will help speed up productivity for newer users. It seems much faster than VIM and VSCode, especially under load. It's highly highly customizable, in ways other editors don't stack up against. Its lack of bloat also is a nice addition to a great product.