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Emacs: Not bad, just misunderstood

People love dissing the Emacs text editor. Emacs is one of those
arcane things that even _geeks_ aren’t expected to understand. It’s
probably the canonical example of a tool built for geeks by geeks:
hard to use, hard to understand, hard to just pick up and play with.

I really don’t think Emacs is bad. It’s just misunderstood, the way
mainstream people think Linux is bad because it’s all command-line
when the truth is that Linux is so much more than that. Emacs is so
much more than what people think it is, but people just settle for the
quick sound bite.

As Alex Schroeder (kensanata) blogged:

23:29 kensanata eek. on creating happy programmers, quote: As Nat Torkington explained to me in his non-politically-correct but useful way, “It’s no longer aspergers and emacs… we’re putting people back into the equation.”
23:29 kensanata aspergers and emacs – that the social niche we live in.
23:29 hober yeah
23:29 hober kensanata: I’m going to blog about that tonight
23:30 e1f you have aspergers?
23:30 kensanata no, i have emacs.

I’m going to blog about this too.

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/3129

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