The topic for the August Emacs Carnival is “Your Elevator Pitch for Emacs.” This is an interesting topic to think about since I feel more often than not Emacs users tend to be shy about promoting the editor. So often I hear the refrain “I personally have used Emacs for 20+ years but I wouldn’t ever recommend a colleague use it, there’s just better alternatives.”

I understand this sentiment. Emacs can be finicky. You may have to spend an hour every now and then debugging your init.el. You’ll probably have to read a good amount of documentation. Despite this, I think it’s good to convey the usefulness and benefits of Emacs. So this would be my Elevator Pitch:

Every developer loves and knows the value of the terminal. Why? When every command, every interaction is a string of text, it opens up the possibility to write scripts, save commands in a notebook, share commands, and even have an LLM generate command.

Emacs adds another dimension to the terminal story: instead of every action being a string of text, everything is a text buffer and keypresses call functions to operate on the environment. Just how the sed, awk, tail, grep commands compound with each other in value, the more you add to Emacs, the more its value compounds. For example, add a grammar checker package and it can now check grammar for everything you do in Emacs: code documentation, emails, commit messages, task list, etc.

If you find power in the terminal and understand its usefulness, you’ve got to try Emacs!

I like this pitch because most devs understand the terminal and its value. It’s always open and constantly used. Some people can even live in the terminal. The terminal is an extremely old technology and there’s nothing particularly pretty about it but despite this everyone uses it. Emacs is old and (to some) ugly, but has a comparable value-add.