Emacs chads just keep winning.
The profound difference lies in ontological fungibility – Emacs isn’t software you use, but cognitive clay that becomes an extension of your mind’s operating system. Where any specialized app is inevitably doomed to constrain you to some kind of constructed imagination of what note-taking/knowledge work should be, Emacs+Org erases the distinction between a tool and thought through radical philosophical pillars.
1. The Medium is the Message Paradox
Emacs rejects the app paradigm's fundamental axiom. Instead of being a "notes app" or "writing app", it's a meta-medium where:
- Your notes can spontaneously become a calendar event → spreadsheet formula → email draft → code compiler
- The act of writing is programming your environment (Org markup becomes executable functions)
- Tools aren't discrete entities but fluid expressions of your current mental state (e.g., I can run a shell command piping it to grep and then pipe the results into a text buffer)
1. Agency Through Textual Primordial Soup
By rooting everything in plain text + programmable buffers, you're working with the substrate of computation itself. Unlike database-driven apps that entomb your ideas in rigid schemas:
- Every thought remains perpetually protean – a TODO item can morph into a API documentation generator through markup alone
- You manipulate knowledge at the level of semantics (headings, tags, properties) rather than fighting GUI metaphors
- The friction between "taking notes" and "building systems" disappears – your journal entries are the configuration files of your life (I manage all my dotfiles — for Linux, Mac, home and work machines via Org-mode)
1. Compounding Selfhood
Specialized apps optimize for atomic efficiency; Emacs thrives on continuous identity investment. Each macro you write, each Org capture template, each minor mode becomes:
- A cognitive microhabitat that evolves with your thinking patterns
- Permanent infrastructure that pays compound interest (my 2010 Org config still works, while Evernote of 2010 is abandonware)
- A mirror of your epistemology – the keybindings/hierarchies are your neural pathways externalized
This creates an irreducible satisfaction: you're not just using tools but cultivating a personal universe where every interaction leaves permanent fertile ground for future growth. The specialized app user lives in rented apartments; the Emacs devotee walks through an ever-expanding mansion whose rooms rearrange themselves to their thoughts.
Do you think what you're talking about is hard to demo?
"- The act of writing is programming your environment (Org markup becomes executable functions)
- Tools aren't discrete entities but fluid expressions of your current mental state (e.g., I can run a shell command piping it to grep and then pipe the results into a text buffer)"
I haven't seen an impressive demo of this kind of stuff tbh.
I'm a regular dweller of https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx. We meet every first Wednesday of the month - if timezone permits it, come talk to us if you have specific questions. I will promise you though to make an effort to produce some demos and publish them.
System Crafters tends to mostly do live streams for more a couple of hours. You learn a lot watching them. But many people don't have the patience for that.
He does a good job of showing some interesting features of Org-mode, yet he doesn't provide any insights of how cross-referencing things in a real workplace scenario may look like, how does Org-mode/Emacs help you to communicate with your colleagues. How it allows you to investigate failing http endpoint or document some investigation where you need to dig into a sql db. How Org integrates with other packages, like Anki, Pomodoro or Noter (for pdf annotations).
Wilson's vids also great, but that too, doesn't work as "marketing material", it's mostly "preaching to the choir" and unlikely to bring attention outside of the Emacs-world, still, those videos are very good.
The point I'm trying to make — there are great videos and tutorials for specific things — Org-mode, text-editing features of Emacs, version control, etc. There aren't many vids to demo "the point of Emacs holistically", with the emphasis on "Always bet on text" https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html, I'm just gonna throw a random quote from that great article: "Text can convey ideas with a precisely controlled level of ambiguity and precision, implied context and elaborated content, unmatched by anything else."
That is the greatest selling point of Emacs. That's what actually makes a huge difference. When it comes to manipulating text - fetching, processing, searching through, dicing, slicing, summarizing, converting, publishing, etc. — Emacs truly is the unmatched king of that prose.
there is evil-mode, even mouse support ;-)
However, Org-Mode is seriously a killer feature that is well worth it on its own. I use emacs to handle all my finances, notes with org-roam, blogging with ox-hugo, dotfiles in a massive org-tangle document, etc. I couldn't find anything remotely to compare it to, and have failed attempts at switching. There are tons of ways of interacting with Emacs that are just lightyears ahead of anything else. Literate programming and tangle are a godsend for tons of different use cases for me as well. I even keep running notes in the base of my codebase so I can hop to various files and capture locations in the relevant files as links in notes.
The only pain point for these tools for me is trying to use them as part of a commandline integration. I really wish org-mode and org-roam's functions were callable outside of emacs, e.g. for automated document generation from org-mode. One of the most painful things I've had to setup is an org-roam-server integration that updates and deploys org-roam-server when the git repo containing its files is updated. Only way to do that seemingly is to run emacs in a very strange way inside of a docker image. Intuitively it feels like org-roam-server should be able to build itself into a static website for deployment. Might seem like a nitpick, but it's really not -- that interface is a huge part of why I use it and not being able to host it without horribly hacky workarounds seems like a massive weakness.
Imagine this — one morning I was watching my colleague showing me a bunch of things over a Zoom video, and I didn't feel comfortable interrupting him with "wait, don't scroll away, I didn't get that, allow me to read it", "hold on, I'm taking notes", etc. I sacrificed my lunch break to write a small Elisp command that runs tesseract to OCR the image in the clipboard. Now, I don't even have to ask my colleagues for explanations or tell them to share the url they are currently browsing — I can just grab it with a couple of keystrokes to make a note. And that's just one, single, isolated example. It cost me twenty minutes of my time. Twenty minutes of investment that paid itself many times over already. And I have tons of similar examples.
You "stay away" from Emacs most likely because you don't know any better. Do you use your editor to read and annotate pdfs? Or watch videos? Or manage the library of your ebooks? Or track your expenses? Or control project management like Jira? Or keep your knowledge base and note-taking? Or interact with LLMs? Or explore APIs like Postman? Or keep your spaced repetition flash cards like Anki? Or use it for chat over platforms like Telegram and Slack? Or find and read RFCs and manpages? Or to perform web-search, search through your browser history, Wikipedia, Youtube? Do you have etymology lookup, thesaurus, dictionaries, translation? Or to order pizza? Or measure distances between coordinates on a map? Automate things based on solar calendar or moon phases? Manage all your configs, aka dotfiles? List, browse and code review Pull Requests, etc., etc.
Now tell me, what a sane person ever exposed to all this usefulness would ever reject it? Only those who never had patience to reach it, or those who are oblivious to the possibilities.
I get the appeal of Emacs but this is exactly where it falls short for me. It’s brittle, monolithic, and too controlling (restricting).
Emacs owns the entire platform. If you want to use an external tool, you have to wrap it in Emacs abstractions. That means dealing with buffers, subprocess plumbing, or writing Elisp bindings. You’re not really integrating; you’re translating everything into “Emacs-speak.”
Meanwhile, tools outside Emacs—like in a Unix shell—are composable by default. I can swap fzf for peco, tesseract for ocrmypdf, or even Neovim for Helix without rewriting my entire environment. That’s real modularity. With Emacs, everything is wired together internally, so small changes can break big things.
And yeah, I can technically replicate workflows inside Emacs, but often it’s reinventing worse versions of tools I already have—eshell instead of zsh, eww instead of a browser, magit instead of plain git in a terminal. That makes it feel more like a self-contained OS than a part of the system.
I’d rather keep my editor focused and compose my environment around it—not inside it. Plus, I rather do certain things in Lua, Python, shell, etc. where I can call it and run it through awk, sed, rg/grep, and so on. I can port that to any other platform and adapt it quickly rather than try to rewrite Lisp.
So... to answer your points specifically --
Do you use your editor to read and annotate pdfs? -- Sure. Using my PDF editor.
Or watch videos? -- I think that's a little easier in shell (mpv, vlc) or directly in a browser.
Or manage the library of your ebooks? -- Calibre
Or track your expenses? -- I have a tool for that.
Or control project management like Jira? -- Jira or their respective tool(s).
Or keep your knowledge base and note-taking? -- Neovim+Lua
Or interact with LLMs? -- There's a shell script for that, browser, or the ChatGPT application.
Or explore APIs like Postman? -- curl, wget, ... or Postman itself.
Or keep your spaced repetition flash cards like Anki? -- Inside Anki. I have a simple shell tool that goes through them as well.
Or use it for chat over platforms like Telegram and Slack? -- In their respective apps?
Or find and read RFCs and manpages? -- My browser, or the shell.
Or to perform web-search, search through your browser history, Wikipedia, Youtube? -- I think it's called a browser. Or the shell.
Do you have etymology lookup, thesaurus, dictionaries, translation? -- Browser. Or the shell.
Or to order pizza? -- Browser. Or the shell.
Or measure distances between coordinates on a map? -- You got me there.
Automate things based on solar calendar or moon phases? -- You got me here, too. I don't have a need for this.
Manage all your configs, aka dotfiles? -- stow, git
List, browse and code review Pull Requests, -- browser, git
etc. -- etc.
etc. -- etc.
Now tell me, what a sane person ever exposed to all this usefulness would ever reject it? -- I feel like I answered this.
Only those who never had patience to reach it, or those who are oblivious to the possibilities. -- I'm aware.
Thanks, this was an entertaining 10 minutes to write.
Saying "I can just use my pdf editor" is on the same level of "integration" as pulling another laptop with a pdf next to the one you have already. What I'm talking about is something like ITEE (Integrated Text Editing Environment), and you simply just don't get it. Emacs allows you to get closer to the plain text as possible. And the value of the plain text proposition is enormous. When every bit of information is reduced to text — it allows you to manipulate information more easily. In Emacs, everything becomes text — the list of directories and files? You can freely edit them — using all the editor features you have — multiple cursors, search-find-replace, macros, whatever. Extracting a bunch of URLs from a web page, or a PDF? Easy. Finding a specific URL from that list and retrieving a description for it? Piece-of-cake. Your browser history — it's just text. Various search engines? They are just a middle-man and you talk to them in text. Version-control interactions? All happen in text. etc. etc.
Of course, browsers allow you to do a ton of interesting things, and btw. it's not using Emacs 'instead', but rather having a choice — e.g., I do use zsh, but some things I do in Eshell in a much more productive way.
Browsers, shells, specific apps, scripting engines, etc. I have no problem using them when I see fit, but it really seems like you have zero idea how actually awesome it is to be able to not only perform spell-checking, but also consult the Merriam-Webster thesaurus, get the definitions for specific words (from another service), translate entire sentences and paragraphs (e.g. via google translate), parley with a bunch of LLM models, perform web search and etymology lookup, consult your own notes and knowledge-base, check through your browser history, etc. etc., and all that "on point" — in the same context and place where you're composing a piece of text. Like a comment you're replying on Hacker News. The mental model between approaches is just vastly different. It puts you into the "flow state" described by renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. And btw., If you think I had to leave my text editor even for a second, to lookup his name to mention it here — you still don't get it.
What are you even talking about? It's like wishing for java programs to be able to execute without JVM, or Erlang-code without BEAM. While that's theoretically possible to a certain degree (using Graal and Lumen), it's not easily achievable.
Org-mode is written in Elisp, of course it needs Emacs to run. You just need Emacs executable and you can absolutely run scripts in batch mode. I have done it many times, running tests on GitHub Actions, etc.
Not understanding something is not a virtue, not something to act smug and superior about.
"It's like wishing for java programs to be able to execute without JVM, or Erlang-code without BEAM."
No, it's not like that.
"Org-mode is written in Elisp, of course it needs Emacs to run."
There are (incomplete of course) apps outside of emacs and elisp that process org-mode files. And even if there weren't, it makes sense to wish that there were. In the mind of a clear and competent thinker, the mere fact that org-mode needs emacs to run is not a reason not to wish it weren't.
I'm sorry that I sounded like acting smug, I'm honestly just trying to understand what you're wishing for. An external (non-elisp) org-mode parser or something? I don't get your last paragraph in your latest response, like at all.
I have a project for hosting org-roam-ui as a website that took a ton of finagling to figure out and is extremely brittle. I had to finally load a custom .el script to prepare emacs to even try to evaluate the 'org-roam-ui' command from the commandline. If emacs prioritized headless / cli operations, this wouldn't have been such a nightmare, but it absolutely was. Just finding the right ports and re-assigning them to get out of each others way was a huge learning curve even for a seasoned emacs-er.
> It's like wishing for java programs to be able to execute without JVM, or Erlang-code without BEAM
No, it's not. It's wishing for basic functionality offered by all other markup languages of which I'm aware. That includes latex and everything supported by pandoc. Org-mode can do all sorts of crazy rendering tasks from its files, and it is worse than pulling teeth to get that functionality into a build pipeline of any kind.
Most new young potential Emacs users are students and new developers being raised on VS Code or JetBrains IDEs. Which out of the box appear modern to their young eyes. So when they see vanilla Gnu Emacs the reaction may be, "Okay Boomer, whateva".
I would argue that the reason Spacemacs and Doom resulted in such massive growth of the Emacs user base had less to do with evil-mode and more to do with attractive theming and applying reasonable default settings that match how those modern UX IDE's work. Not to mention the myriad of YouTube videos about them.
I fail to comprehend why the old school graybeards refuse to update the default appearance of Emacs. Of course the out of box experience should be mostly spartan but it could look a whole lot prettier. I would like to see Emacs devs adopt Prot's standard light and dark themes, they need to replace the traditional default theme and be distributed with Emacs. The default theme can hardly be called a theme, it likely predates theming in Emacs.
I don't know anyone who sticks with the out of box appearance of Emacs.
I think we are going to need some curated video demonstrations including slow-motion and key presses being shown. Real world tasks being demonstrated. Including eshell and REPL, etc.
I too have been toying with creating some of these demos. We need to create focused compelling videos that are rather short. Showing off just how great Emacs is overall. Seeing is believing.
So many junior devs never saw Emacs and only maybe they heard something about it but never took a deeper look. It is always some rogue graybeard who shows off in front of junior dev and that dev needs to pick their jaw off the floor. similar occurs with Neovim.
We should espouse the wonders of Plain Text and how you'll never be locked into a proprietary file format. You can use it with Git for revision history and tracking changes. The power of Elisp enables non-developers.
We need to start a sort of grassroots marketing campaign to spread the word. In a nice way. i.e. don't bash the competition. Just show what Emacs can do in short highly focused videos. Emacs can speak for itself.
It certainly often does, but there also examples where maybe it's not the biggest issue? git, vim, LaTeX, ffmpeg — they all find their users despite being so demonstrably bad with "the first impression".
Besides, I feel here you're talking about Emacs-the-text-editor, while what I'm rather babbling about Emacs-the-lisp-machine. You see, my point is, people talk about Emacs-the-text-editor all the time and keep arguing if it's "modern enough" or "outdated", "archaic" or "useless". The same way it can be rationalized as Emacs-the-web-browser, Emacs-the-email-client, Emacs-the-IDE, Emacs-the-version-control-system, etc. Of course, anyone who learned how to operate a decent email client perhaps wouldn't ever see a point of suddenly switching to Emacs-the-email-client, unless they could look at it from my POV — a Lisper's point of view. Because the email client aspect of it has been thoroughly imbued with Lisp, it makes it extremely appealing terrain for me — I can with relative ease erect my creations on top of it, limited maybe only by the boundaries of my imagination, rather than technical limitations.
If only it was possible to convince an entire generation of programmers of unthinkable elegancy and pragmatism of Lisp, wouldn't that be great? Imagine a world where "every programmer knows some Lisp" is the norm, rather than the current assumption that "every programmer is familiar with Javascript, SQL, and Bash" – which, in reality, is almost universally not the case.
That is the essence of my plea — it isn't so much about Emacs itself, but about the widespread ignorance of coders who dismiss Lisp as an idea. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't even be here, discussing the reasons why Emacs is so unpopular.
> This lack of an attempt is not some sort of flaw."
It could be, but perhaps on the other end here — maybe the evangelism and elucidation are at fault? Seasoned adepts often forget "the beginner's journey" and can't break through the "communication disconnect". It's hard to explain the "what" and "how" without effectively conveying the "why", especially when the other side is not interested in hearing the "why".
I'm just sad that a lot of very talented folk either choose to ignore or deliberately dismiss some great ideas, building their assumptions based on some shorts they watch on YouTube or TikTok.
The lack of attempt may not be a flaw, but maybe "the lack of attention" is our generational flaw? Maybe while I'm focused on Emacs and Lisp, I'm failing to see a bigger picture, where tons of other pragmatic ideas get dumped overboard because they don't align with the prevailing narrative?
When communicating over Slack my colleagues would send me a ticket number in Jira or a link to some code snippet on GH. When I have to share the same (or similar) stuff — I can easily provide the exact link to the ticket, with its description, I can quickly retrieve some relevant data from that ticket, if I'm adding some notes. When I'm sharing a link to a code snippet, I can easily retrieve the fully-qualified namespace and the name of the function, so the url is not some arbitrary incantation that my teammates have to guess about before clicking on it — it contains the exact piece of information they may like to see even before opening it.
When someone shares 'some incantation' with me, I don't even hesitate — I delegate the task to Emacs, and it is smart enough to recognize that a piece of plain text like "XYZ-146" is a Jira ticket, that "RFC-6364" is a document, that a github url is a link to a PR — with a single keystroke I can browse the jira ticket, read RFC document, explore the changes in the PR. I can invoke an LLM on the spot to summarize the points of the RFC document, to give me some insight to add a comment to the PR review.
All that without a hassle, all that done with simple keystrokes, all in one place. I can easily copy relevant information into my notes, I can grab stuff from my notes and share with my colleagues, easily converting Org-mode markup into Markdown without even blinking. The flow is there. And that flow also contributes to the general well-being of my teammates. I can assure you, they are happier with me using Emacs, even though most of them don't even know anything about it.
> the value proposition of emacs simple is no longer there
My main point from the get-go was that most people don’t even realize what a ‘value proposition’ there is.