GNU Emacs Reviews & Product Details

Completely customizable in every way. Very consistent user experience in either the terminal or as a GUI application. Switching between buffers (you'll learn about this quickly) and executing code right in Emacs is very easy. Working on a remote server, Emacs provides multiple windows (C-x 3) for sharing data between a command line and a text file that you might be editing--very cool! Emacs has been around since the late 1970's and is just as relevant to computing as it ever has been. Not many other software tools can claim this. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Rather steep learning curve to get all the key chords down but they become second nature after a while. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- You can use emacs do anything

- Emacs totally configurable.

- You feel better than vim user. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Emacs starts slowly. You should wait more than 10 seconds sometimes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I love Emacs, it's my default text editor, terminal manager and sometimes mail client. It's infinitely extensible, and once you activate a few packages you'll see how powerful it can be. There is obviously something of a learning curve to Emacs, but at this point I can operate more effectively in an Emacs window than anywhere else on my machine. Furthermore, many of the Emacs keybindings are also the defaults in many other apps (Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E to get to the start and end of the line for example), and so having these stored in muscle memory makes your life better. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Emacs comes with some dumb defaults (Having to type M-x goto-line to goto a given line number for example), the very first thing I do on a new Emacs install is to fix a whole bunch of these things, to the point that my .emacs.d directory contains hundreds of lines of Lisp. Protip: If you're just getting started, begin by installing something like Prelude, which is a set of Emacs configurations that fix a bunch of the insane defaults. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

for me emacs is the best available editor on Linux, in addition to all the fantastic packages that you can install, you have a level of customization detail unprecedented.

Other reasons are some iconic packages that I cannot live without anymore like maggit, org-mode and babel. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's sometime slow when executing heavy tasks and it for some action where io is needed the ui is blocked.

The learning curve is quiet steep and no good default configuration is provided for new users (this is fixed by prelude or spacemac) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The possibility to extend it with ease, Helps and its many packages, magit, orgmode, smartparens ... The buffers management, and the mighty tab indentation! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The single -threading and locking... And poor support for some languages, which I honestly don't use! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The best thing about emacs are how easy it is to extend it and how it has features for everything imaginable while still being a decently sized software package. It's also unobstrusive and is solid as a rock.

Another good thing about Emacs is that it works exactly the same accross all it's supported platforms, down to the configuration files themselves.

As a bonus, Emacs is also extensively documented and there are lots of useful information on the Web about it and it's configuration language Emacs Lisp. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's very steep learning curve. Though it's so well documented that's not really a problem. Enabling Cua-Mode (changes key bindings so that copy/paste/cut and the like use the traditional ctrl+c/v/x instead of Emacs quite unusual key binsings) is quite obscure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Emacs makes me more productive as a developer. org-mode (orgmode.org) has organized my entire life. It's practically its own operating system; there's very little that emacs can't do.

Having used vim, Atom, Sublime Text, Notepad++ and a variety of other editors over the years, I always come back to emacs. The history of emacs is colorful and its cult-like following (see: Saint IGNUcious).

One of the best features of emacs, often going unmentioned, is that it works just as well in a console as it does in a more modern graphical environment. So even in a PuTTY console on Windows (connected to, say, an EC2 instance) I can use emacs just like I would natively on OS X's desktop. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Out of the box, it's pretty terrible. Try prelude for some better defaults: https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude

The learning curve is step and seemingly almost infinite. In-depth configuration requires learning Emacs LISP.

At first glance, it has an extremely unappealing color scheme and keys that will only familiar if you are using this keyboard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard (what is a "Meta" key?!) and upon further inspection has some downright pathological behavior (leaving "emacs droppings", or files ending in "~" everywhere). Fortunately, these are easily resolved with one of the many "starter kits" including Prelude, mentioned above. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Emacs has been around forever, so has a large base of support and experience to go with it. The set of extensions is pretty extensive, though not always comprehensive. You can customize Emacs to do pretty much anything you like. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is overly complex, a bit on the large side, and one need to learn the LISP language to write extensions for Emacs. As a text editor, its keyboard shortcuts are fairly arcane. It uses a GUI only as an afterthought if at all, when available. It is not installed by default on many common systems (Mac OS, Linux) due to its large size and steep learning curve. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nice hot key controls. Love the walkthrough tutorial that's always available, thorough enough without being overkill. Solid documentation. Great customization options. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Took some time to get used to, but the tutorial is helpful and documentation is solid. Github defaulting to vim makes it frustrating for an emacs-dedicated user. If github defaulted to emacs, that would be awesome. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Emacs can be customized to fit specific needs. It provides the ability to use and assign keyboard shortcuts for many, many tasks. I like the ability to choose which plugins I use. I also like the ability to customize aesthetic aspects of my work environment, including the look and feel of Emacs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is a steep learning curve. This must be overcome in order to be productive. It is not always as powerful as a full-fledged IDE like IntelliJ. Debugging a running program is not nearly as full-featured as debugging in a full-fledged IDE. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.