Failing to share the benefits of using Emacs

August 19, 2024

I’ve become self-conscious about proselyting Emacs to my friends and in public spaces. As enthusiastic as I am about Emacs, I find it difficult to convince others to invest in the learning process. And it is undeniably an investment. I limit my pitch attempts to already technical people that I think could benefit and (more importantly) would enjoy the same things many of us do about Emacs. My arguments tend to get dismissed, however, and I’ve been trying to understand why.

This has been observed before, but I particularly like the way Prot said it a few months ago:

The skills you acquire as you gain more experience with Emacs have a compounding effect. You eventually get more out of the time you invest in them, which practically means that you are empowered to design the workflow you want …

It strikes me how unusual this compounding effect is among our software tools. As technical professionals we tend to look for the best tool for the job until the tool changes or the job changes, and don’t think much of either when we move beyond it. We’re vocationally accustomed to, perhaps optimized for, having our technology stack swap itself out every few years and have trained ourselves out of committing too deeply to anything in the stack. Ultimately that commitment has an expiration date.

I don’t think most people fully understand that the compounding returns of an investment in Emacs is a lifetime benefit. That Emacs might be the one piece of software we use that could outlive us. And when I try to make that argument to my Obsidian / VS Code / JetBrains using friends you should see the looks I get.