What is Emacs
Emacs is an admirable text editor that can turn its users into extremely productive hackers. By hackers i mean “builders”, and not crackers. In point of fact, it is an understatement to claim that emacs is an editor. Some profess that emacs is an Operating System(OS). There is a famous emacs joke recounted, “Emacs is an OS that lacks a descent text editor.” :-) Emacs permits its users, amongst other functionalities, to:
- Play Games
- Check Emails
- Use the terminal(shell)
- Customize their experiences
- Write books, presentations
- Edit text :-)
I wrote this post in emacs. Amongst Emacs’s features, is the aspect that emacs is a ‘way of life.’ It is a way of life that lets you get things done. For example, i am writing this post thanks to emacs.
An emacs screenshot i made. An example of splitting the Emacs frame(or window). Python notes, with in-line code execution to the left. To the right, Tetris game, and a shell window with the results of: ‘dig google.com’ command
You can read more about emacs here: http://gnu.org/software/emacs
Org-mode
Emacs has a monstrous amount of extensions, or call them apps that specialize in making users have a good time. Org-mode is most definitely a hacker’s haven. It is a tool that stands out as a notes management system. Again, this is an understatement; You need to use it to understand what it is. Org-mode is just great at notes taking, organizing thougts in plain text, and it most importantly provides means of exporting text to other formats. This post was written in Org-mode and then exported to markdown, and html.
A screenshot of Emacs org-mode…
More about Org-mode: http://orgmode.org
Why Emacs or Org-mode
It’s because of text. :-) It is said that, “Text is to a hacker as wood is to a wood worker.” A wood worker would be deeply in love with her greatest wood cutting or shaping tools. Emacs and its invalauable collection of apps is just that arsenal of tools that would make me enjoy my woodworking/hacking kind of undertakings.
