GNU Emacs - Swiss army knife of organization and text tools.
Rating: 7 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
I use GNU Emacs as my primary text editor, as well as an organization tool for project tracking and to-dos as well as scheduling and planning. It is also used for taking notes and recording bits of information for easy retrieval later. I also use it for searching and parsing multiple large log files for troubleshooting.
Pros
- GNU Emacs is a text editor that can do almost anything that you want to do with it. It is fairly easy to extend the functionality using Emacs Lisp with a large library available.
- It can be easily customized using themes as well as custom code to change the look and feel as well as how everything works.
Cons
- There is a bit of a learning curve for Emacs. In order to use it most efficiently, it takes a little time to learn the Emacs way, as well as learning the keyboard commands for everything. Many things can be done from the menu, but the keyboard is really most efficient.
- Customizing and extending Emacs is done with Emacs Lisp. While very flexible, Lisp is a bit different programming language than many people are used to.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are willing to put in a little time to learn how GNU Emacs works, it can be an extremely powerful and versatile editing tool, as well as being used for almost any kind of text searching, replacing, or processing. Using Org-mode alone is worth learning Emacs. Once you learn the basics, they can be applied and used in all areas that you would use Emacs for. If you want a text editor and information tool that you can use for almost everything, then the learning curve is worth it. If you want simple text editor for editing small files, then Emacs may be overkill.
Vetted Review
20 years of experience