Miskatonic University Press

Uses Emacs

emacs uses.this

There was a new one at up The Setup, which got me wondering about the Emacs users they’ve profiled. I think this is them all:

  • Joe Armstrong: “Emacs, make and bash for all programming.”
  • Mary Rose Cook: “There are three reasons to use emacs. One, it is available on a lot of platforms. Two, it can be used for almost any task. Three, it is very customisable. I only take advantage of reason three. From this perspective, using emacs is kind of like making a piece of art. You start with a big block and you slowly chip away, bringing it closer and closer to what you want.”
  • Kieran Healy: “I do most of my writing and all of my data analysis in Emacs 23, which I run full-screen on the left-hand monitor (usually split into a couple of windows).”
  • Phil Hagelberg: “I do as much as I can in GNU Emacs since it pains me to use monolithic software that can’t be modified at runtime.”
  • Eric S Raymond: “Most of my screen time is spent in a terminal emulator, Emacs, and Firefox.”
  • Richard Stallman: “I spend most of my time using Emacs.”
  • Benjamin Mako Hill: “People complain about Emacs but I’m actually pretty happy with it.”
  • Andrew Plotkin: “I always have Emacs up, in one Terminal. “
  • Christian Neukirchen: “Emacs is for almost all development and dealing with mail as well as writing longer texts. I prefer vi for administrative tasks and on remote machines, where I have no configuration of my own.”
  • Kate Matsudaira: “Emacs - I have tried moving to Eclipse, vi, and several others, but since I know Lisp well (it was one of the first programming languages I learned!) I can do pretty much anything in Emacs.”
  • John MacFarlane: “I use Emacs for just a few things – browsing compressed archives, for example, and maintaining a todo list with org-mode. Evil-mode makes Emacs bearable.”
  • Tamas Kemenczy: “Emacs is home sweet home and I use it across the board for development and pretty much anything text-related.”
  • Paul Tweedy: “My .emacs file is a carefully-curated history of customisations, workarounds, hacks and blatant bad habits that I’ve grown to depend on over the years.”
  • Mark Pilgrim: “Emacs 23 full-screen on the center (widescreen) monitor. I have relatively few Emacs customizations, but the big one is ido-mode, which I just discovered this year (thanks Emacs subreddit).”
  • Jonathan Corbet: “The way it usually settles out is that I use emacs when I’m running as my self and vi when I’m doing stuff as root.”
  • Aaron Boodman: “Over time, those constraints have whittled my work environment down to the following simple tools: Ubuntu Linux, emacs -nw (terminal mode), Screen, Irssi, Git.
  • Mike Fogus: “However, within the past six months I’ve moved completely to Emacs org-mode with org-mode-babel. I can’t believe that I didn’t switch earlier.”
  • Seth Kenlon: “I write a lot, almost always in XML, so I use Emacs in nxml-mode. I use the Docbook schema and process it with xmlto or xsltproc. I also use Emacs for screenplays, organizing tasks, web design, and coding.”
  • Neha Narula: “On my research machine I basically live inside Chrome, emacs, a terminal, and git.”
  • Bret Taylor: “I write all my code in Emacs, and I despise IDEs.”
  • Brad Fitzpatrick: “Linux (Ubuntu and Debian), Chrome, emacs, screen, Go, Perl, gcc, Gimp, tcpdump, wireshark, Xen, KVM, libvirt. etc.”
  • John Myles White: “If I’m working only at the command-line, I’ll use emacs.”
  • Chris Wanstrath: “I write code and prose in Aquamacs. I’ve even written a few plugins (“modes”) for it: textmate.el and coffee-mode.”
  • Adewale Oshineye: “However I always end up going back to Emacs (AquaMacs on OSX, vanilla Emacs on Linux and NTEmacs in the days when I used Windows), IntelliJ and TextMate.”
  • Dhanji Prasanna: “In the Vi/Emacs wars I don’t take sides, I was probably the only Googler who used both equally (and a lot).”
  • Tim Bray: “Creative time is spent in Aquamacs Emacs (blogging, coding in languages with poor IDE support like Perl and Erlang), Eclipse (Android development), NetBeans (Java, Ruby, Clojure, and C development), and Gmail (via a Fluidized Safari).”
  • Liza Daly: “I’m the only one on the team who uses emacs, but that’s what I learned in college. My brain doesn’t take to GUI development environments.”
  • Jason Rohrer: “I code using Emacs, and I compile in the terminal using GNU makefiles and GCC.”
  • Josh Nimoy: “I use emacs as my IDE, splitting the editor in half and having eshell in the top window to run the Makefile.”
  • John Baez: “I spend a lot of time writing papers and preparing talks with free software: emacs for text editing, LaTeX for typesetting, and IrfanView for editing images. I blog using Wordpress and Google+. Nothing fancy, since I want to focus on the ideas.”
  • Hugo Liu: “I like to hack in Python using Emacs in a Terminal window.”
  • Daniel Stenberg: “Apart from the OS, I’m a C coder and an Emacs user, and what more do you need?”
  • Andrei Alexandrescu: “Anyhow, on a regular basis I use OpenNX to connect remotely to big iron - a blade running CentOS 5.2 - and run emacs remotely for editing.”
  • Dana Contreras: “When I need a terminal-based editor, I use Emacs, like god intended.”
  • Geoffrey Grosenbach: “Emacs for text editing. Most of the time I don’t know what my fingers are typing. They just do what I’m thinking. To me, that’s the definition of a great text editor.”
  • Gabriel Weinberg: “On the server, I’m usually in emacs and messing around with git and nginx.”
  • Matthew Mckeon: “My platform for data munging scripts is mostly Ruby these days, however Emacs is my dirty secret.”
  • Ben Fry: “Most of my time is spent with Emacs, Processing, Eclipse, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS3.”
  • Jonathan Foote: “My tools have not changed much since grad school: emacs for coding and print statements for debugging.”
  • Chris Slowe: “Last but not least, the software I actually run at any given time is 90% Emacs, Terminal, and Chrome.”
  • Ted Leung: “I typically run tools from the command line - zsh in my case, and do my text editing in Emacs.”
  • Andrew Huang: “For day to day stuff, I use emacs for text editing, Firefox for my web browser, and Windows Media Player for music.”

M-x all-praise-emacs