emacs elevator pitch

Before emacs: vim, htop, weechat, taskwarrior, xterm

After emacs: emacs, emacs, emacs, emacs, emacs

Let’s say I wanted to get into plain text accounting. In a world before emacs, I would be interested in some TUI interface, with it’s own associated config file. Maybe the display looks like ass out of the box, so I add some display options and make the colors match my terminal color theme. What if I want to add an alert when my bank account has less than $X in it? I would have to add some polling script and link it to my notifier, or find some suitable webhook I want to ping.

If I’m an emacs user though? I find the correlated emacs package. The colors are automatically derived from the loaded emacs theme. The settings are assigned from my existing emacs init.el file. I want to add that notifier? I tack on an emacs timer, and use message to surface the alert in whatever buffer I’m already in.

I don’t need to grok some new interface for my new tool, I can reach it from the already-familiar emacs interface! yay

In emacs there are no formal namespaces. When some package creates a function called foo, it becomes available in every context right away. Should my config (or some other package) define foo, it is overridden and now the new definition is in play. To some, this sounds like hell. If anyone can step on your toes, shouldn’t everything collapse??

And yet, with informal namespacing via prefixes (eg s.el, f.el, ht.el), everything continues on just fine. And the shared state means it’s easy for the user to glue pieces of code together, even if that was never the intent of the authors in the first place. An example: recently, I started using 2 packages, chatgpt-shell and whisper.el - these are for chatting with an llm in a comint buffer and sending stt (speech to text) to your editor, respectively. Even though these packages were not designed with the other in mind, with a small bit of elisp glue I can create a push-to-talk experience with chatgpt-shell! All I had to do was tell whisper to submit the message after recording:

(defun ns/send-whisper-message ()
  (interactive)
  (when (eq major-mode 'chatgpt-shell-mode)
    (shell-maker-submit)))

(add-hook 'whisper-after-insert-hook #'ns/send-whisper-message)

If whisper.el had not provided such a hook, it would have been trivial to advise functions in whisper, or even override them for different behavior, all without needing to change whisper.el itself. You can have your cake in your config, move on with your life, and think about upstream at your whim.