Top Rated GNU Emacs Alternatives
It's a classic. There is minimalism, simplicity, and elegance to it.
Emacs is available as a package to install on all flavors of Linux and can be installed with one command.
As they say with photography, "The best camera is the one that you have with you." If you're ever logged into a server remotely, (or for that matter, something really complex like: a firewalled server via SSH via another private subnet server via SSH via tunneling over SSH to a VPN server), you simply can't set up your IDE and have it be useful to you in Dimension X, when your IDE is only useful to you in your local environment.
Emacs is ultra-lightweight and was designed to run on the crappiest computers.
I can open, edit my file, save, and close it, and be off to testing/iterating on my product/feature/website/whatever I'm building before the other person has even found and navigated the file to open with his IDE.
With Emacs and a sufficiently large screen, I can split-window an arbitrary number of times just by using keyboard shortcuts. I regularly work with 2-4 files open in 4 quadrants; other times I have had 6-8 files windows (called buffers in Emacs) open.
Emacs is extensible with Lisp extensions, so you can get just about any new benefits of modern IDEs like code-complete, syntax and line highlighting, static checking, etc by installing plugins. I have my go-to Emacs customizations that I've been maintaining for over 15 years. (See GitHub repo: jontsai/dotemacs). There are also online communities sharing dotemacs files, e.g. http://dotemacs.de/
By being simple (unobtrusive, no fidgeting with mouse, extensive keyboard shortcuts, etc), Emacs and Vim allow you to get into the zone, that productive existence in the space-time continuum where developers can either a) code for 12 hours straight, or b) produce effective output for a day in 2 hours, cranking out code like a beast.
Terminal / Command line is awesomesauce. And Emacs can run from the terminal. Does your IDE run in the terminal? No? I didn't think so.
Macros in Emacs are really nice (you can record, replay macros).
Emacs is an IDE, but not in the sense that people think about IDEs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Nothing. Emacs is the best editor there ever was. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Video Reviews
My go-to code editor when I SSH into a remote server
82 out of 83 Total Reviews for GNU Emacs
Overall Review Sentiment for GNU Emacs
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Power. Flexibility.
I love to able to do everything in the same software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Lack of interaction with other users.
No availbility to install in work. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Open source, built in. It works like charm for Linux-based operating systems. It is very simple to use. It is possible to do real-time edits, a classic editor and it is very customizable as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
While GNU emacs is legacy software, it isn't meant for everyone, especially the new GUI-loving generation. Needless to say, it has a comparatively steeper learning curve if you are accustomed to GUI editors. Also, compared to those fancy GUI editors, its functionalities are somewhat limited. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Emacs and VIM are the text-only editors that are commonly used across Linux environments. Sometimes when you ssh into a machine there is no GUI editors available and you often reach for an editor like this. This is what I like best about emacs. It's usually installed on every machine and makes it easy to edit a variety of file formats on a remote machine. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Some people use Emacs as a daily driver, but I do not. There are too many nice GUI features that editors like sublime, vscode have that emacs does not have out of the box. If you are on a GUI desktop I prefer not to use emacs since it is text only. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
One feature, I don't know in other editor, is the ability to run subshell inside the editor, M-x rgrep M-x compile etc ... I also enjoy using fantastic modes like org-mode to manage notes... tramp is a cool utility to visit remote filesystems (ssh, ftp). magit worth to be used if you use git. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It's unclear over version to maintain configuration, usually I split my configs files and load them on purpose. debuging inside editor is not that easy, the mail client is counter intuitive, ie If I just want to open an IMAP url , I'll have to define a bunch of variables. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Fully-configurable. You can configure anything - Theme, sytnax highlighter, checker, menu options, keyboard shortcuts.
Cross-platform and consistent experience. I have a github repository with .emacs.d for emacs configuration accessible on any operation system.
Active and expert community. emacs community is supportive and experienced. emacs is older than me, so are many emacs developers. :) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
A steep learning curve at the beginning. In fact, I gave up emacs twice before I fell in love with it the third time and decided to commit to it for the foreseeable future. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
GNU Emacs is a powerful editor which provides the facility of an in-built sub-shell. It supports UNICODE fully. Everything can be done which can be done using any modern IDE. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
It lacks good documentation. The repositories are scattered. It requires a lot of considerable time to learn working on GNU Emacs and that too, shortcuts are not easy to remember. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
keyboard only interaction, extensive libraries, rich macros, same keyboard shortcuts i've used for over 30 years Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
not exactly easy to learn or discover. integration with modern development systems limited or DIY Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Emacs can do anything and the lisp extensions can tune it for any programming language or coding standards Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
There is a learning curve of the better part of a day Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Everything can be done with the keyboard, without once using the mouse. An extensive amount of shortcuts are available Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Learning emacs is a steep learning curve. It requires lots of time to get into the workflow with emacs and memorizing the shortcuts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
