GNU Emacs Reviews & Product Details

Built in commands for traversing through the long code.

Complete package for downloading and installing extensions including great performance Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Average user interface

Complex for beginners need to know editing commands,opening files

Having indentation problems ,omitting lines when copy/paste text or code Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Emacs is great! It has a lot of powerful and useful features. As a programmer, it allows me to work easier and faster, on several files at the same time. But other jobs can love it too! It also has tons of plugins to enhance its functionnality, you can even write your own!! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When using a lot of packages, there can be incompatibility between them and that can be annoying, especially when key bindings are in conflict.

Emacs is not really AZERTY-friendly.

And, it is not good looking at all if you think it is a flaw. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Extensibility

2. Help

3. No-mouse environment

4. In no time you can make Emacs 'your own Emacs'

5. You can replace almost every single software on your computer with Emacs, one at a time

6. Emacs is style! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is nothing to dislike about Emacs for it is one of the essential software a computer should have. I'm do not like Vim, neither am I a fan of Notepad++, so Emacs is everything for me. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the fact that this editor doesn't lag and leaves a good impression with it's quick functionality. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don't really think there is something to dislike about it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The amount of customization that you can do in emacs really gives you the ability to make it your own. With community plugins readily available and supported for countless languages and frameworks it is hard to ignore. The built in package manager is very useful. The community around emacs is mature and often is able to help you when you run into any problems. This editor is old, but has gone through decades of improvement by thousands of engineers which has left it in a really good state. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Onboarding for emacs is challenging at first, but the built in tutorial offers a soft landing. Once out of the tutorial it just takes practice and time to become comfortable with it. It is a little daunting when you first get going as there is so much you can do that figuring out first steps can be difficult. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Quickly develop elegant macros and keybindings Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Overhead for less tech-savvy users, cumbersome font configuration Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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.

I've used emacs for almost 6 years now, nothing can compare with it in terms of feature and usability for a text-based environment. On server-based environment, a text editor is necessary to use and emacs clearly makes the difference with all its shortcuts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The lisp configuration is not easy to grasp at first but you understand it after a while. Another issue is some terminals might inject some characters sometimes at the top of some files sometimes. The shortcuts are not very easy to master for beginners, some simple tutorial is definitely required to understand how the basic functions are working (other console editors also have this problem generally). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Emacs is extremely powerful and useful out of the box. Over the 16 years that I've been using it, I have repeatedly run into examples of real-world problems (refactors, broad code changes, text-based processing) that have been too hard or too time consuming for other developers to work on; or worse, that people feel they have to write a script to solve. As an emacs user, I don't have to write a script, I just run a few built-in commands using a couple keystrokes (or record a macro) and I'm done in a few minutes. This kind of advantage over all other non-emacs-aware computer professionals has served me well - it's literally a "secret-weapon" level of advantage that emacs users have. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Emacs does have a steep learning curve. I think for a lot of people, especially in the "on-demand TV and instant iOS app store gratification" generation, this is something they struggle to understand and take the plunge on - without an instant download and default set of config, and without a seems-quick-but-slows-you-down mouse-clicking interface; they don't have the attention span required to learn something of deep and lasting value, and thus miss out on the benefits of emacs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The keyboard-based navigation is the key benefit, and only takes a few hours to get into your muscle memory. Once you get the basic movement commands and the commands for finding different files, editing text becomes natural and fast, like an extension of your thoughts.

Once you can't live without the ability to edit text quickly, there are a nearly infinitely number of other things Emacs can do to make your day-to-day better. Once you start installing and using packages from MELPA, Emacs is a modern development environment for almost any language.

While I haven't used it as much as I could, org-mode documents are the only way I keep todo lists now.

I've easily saved a few hours of tedious button pushing with keyboard macros. I hit a key to start recording, edit a line of text as I would anyhow, hit a key to stop recording, and then I can play back those keystrokes on the next 1000 lines in no time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

With the endless extensibility of Emacs, it's easy to spend a lot of time on meta-work rather than actual work. Often that time is well spent, and ends up saving you time in the long run, but it's easy to fall into a trap of feeling productive editing your config files in order to avoid the task you're actually supposed to be doing.

Additionally, it can be frustrating to update packages and find that they no longer work the way they worked before. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.