GNU Emacs has been the editor of choice for many users for many years. Despite new operating systems, environments and applications, emacs still has a place in the toolbox for both new and old users. I talked to the authors of Learning GNU Emacs, Third Edition: Eric S Raymond, Deb Cameron, Bill Rosenblatt, Marc Loy, and Jim Elliott about the emacs religion, nervous keyboard twitches and whether emacs has a future in an increasingly IDE driven world.

Well, I guess the answer to the age-old geek question of ’emacs’ or ‘vi’ is pretty much covered with this book?Jim Elliott (JJE): We pretty much start with the assumption that people picking up the book want to know about Emacs. I had fun following the flame wars for a while a decade ago, but we’ve moved on. Some of my best friends and brightest colleagues swear by vi.Bill Rosenblatt (BR): I try not to get involved in theological arguments.Deb Cameron (DC): Like all religious questions, you can only answer that for yourself.Eric S. Raymond (ESR): Oh, I dunno. I think we sidestepped that argument rather neatly.Marc Loy (ML): I think the other authors have chimed in here, but this book “preaches to the choir.” We don’t aim to answer that religious debate. We just want to help existing converts! Of course I think emacs! but I’m a bit biased.Could you tell me how you (all) got into using emacs?ESR: I go back to Gosling Emacs circa 1982 — it was distributed with the variant of 4.1BSD (yes, that was 4.*1*) we were using on our VAX. I was ready for it, having been a LISP-head from way back.ML: During my first programming course at college, I went to the computer lab and sat down in front of a Sun X terminal. There were two cheat-sheets for editors: emacs and vi. They were out of the vi batch at the time. So I jumped head first into emacs. By the time they had the vi batch replenished, I was hooked and never looked back.DC: At a startup in Cambridge where I worked, vi was the sanctioned editor. But Emacs evangelists were on the prowl, offering to teach the one true editor in private sessions. Support people threw up their hands in disgust as yet another one one turned to Emacs, though this was too early for GNU Emacs. It was CCA Emacs. The only problem in my opinion was the lack of a book, like O’Reilly’s Learning vi. That gap was the impetus for writing this book.JJE: I was introduced to the mysteries when I was a co-op intern at GE’s Corporate R&D Center in upstate New York, near my undergraduate alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. My mentor and colleagues handed me a cheat sheet and introductory materials, and I took to it like a fish to water, after getting over the initial learning curve. We were developing graphical circuit design software on SUN workstations, creating our own object-oriented extensions to C, since there was not yet a viable C++ implementation, never mind Java.BR: I was working as a sysadmin in the mid-1980s at a software company that did a lot of government contract work. I was on a project that required relatively little of my time, so I had a lot of time on my hands. I had some exposure to emacs from a previous job, and I decided, rather than just doing crossword puzzles all day, to spend my time learning GNU Emacs as a means of learning LISP. I ended up contributing some code to GNU emacs, such as the first floating point arithmetic library.Emacs uses a fairly unique keyboard control mechanism (C-x C-s for save, for example). Do you think this is one of the reasons why many find emacs confusing?ML: Certainly! But for those that can get past this (large) initial hurdle, I think the keyboard controls increase general productivity. The amount of text manipulation I can do all while “touch typing” in emacs has always impressed me.DC: I think new users might find Emacs confusing either by reputation or because they don’t have this book or haven’t tried the tutorial. C-x C-s is like any finger habit, easy to acquire and with Emacs, easy to change if you so desire, even if you’re not a LISP hacker. And cua mode lets you use more common bindings easily if your fingers aren’t already speaking Emacs natively.JJE: Undoubtedly. That’s a big part of the learning curve. But it’s much less of a problem than it used to be, now that keyboards have so many extra keys (like separate, reliable arrow keys, page movement keys, and the like). And, even more importantly, there is is now by default a visible menu bar and icons to fall back on until you learn the more-efficient keyboard commands. Old hands will remember how much of a nightmare the heavy use of control characters (especially C-s and C-q) used to be, when using modems to dial in through text terminal servers. These almost always interacted poorly with the terminal server’s flow control, and there were usually a couple of other problem keystrokes too. Now that we’re all using TCP/IP and graphical environments, people have it easy!BR: It tends to divide the programmers from the nonprogrammers. Programmers tend to think that control keys are more, not less, intuitive than using regular letters and numbers like vi. But then maybe I’m just showing signs of religious bigotry.ESR: Probably the biggest single one, at least judging by the way my wife Cathy reacts to it.Emacs is something of a legend – how much longer can we expect to see emacs as a leading editor and environment; especially when compared to IDEs like Eclipse?ML: That’s an excellent question. I doubt it will ever disappear, but I do see it losing ground to focused IDEs. For example, I use Eclipse for my Java programming, but I have it set to use emacs keyboard shortcuts.DC: Emacs offers infinite flexibility and extensibility. Nothing else offers that. As long as there are hackers, there will be Emacs.ESR: There will always be an Emacs, because there will always be an ecological niche for an editor that can be specialized via a powerful embedded programming language.JJE: To elaborate on ESR’s response, editors like Eclipse and JEdit give you powerful and flexible customization through Java, and tend to ship with better basic support for advanced language features and refactoring operations, and it’s easy to look a lot better than Emacs at first glance. But there isn’t anything that compares to its breadth, and how amazingly quickly and flexibly you can extend it if you want to. That’s something that comes from using LISP. You really can’t beat it for deep, dynamic control and power. (And I hope readers unfamiliar with LISP will take the opportunity Emacs gives to explore and learn it; the exercise of becoming a competent LISP hacker is extremely valuable in developing deep programming skills.) I use Eclipse for editing Java, but I use Emacs for most everything else.BR: I think there will always be a role for emacs, because of its extensibility and the fact that visual programming environments are largely cosmetic rather than substantive improvements over character-oriented ones. The day when visual programming languages (as opposed to those written with ascii characters) become popular is the day when emacs will possibly become obsolete. There’s little better evidence of emacs’s longevity than the fact that you are interviewing us for a book that was originally written about 15 years ago (in fact, I am somewhat amazed that you are doing this). There are very few tech books that have been around that long. It’s because of the longevity of the software.I find it pretty hard – and I’ve been using emacs for 15 years – to find something that emacs can’t do; is there anything that you think should be supported by emacs but currently isn’t?JJE: The Unicode support is still very rough-edged, given the wrong approaches that were originally taken. It’s hard to work with Asian alphabets, and XML documents with mixed alphabets, without getting a little nuts. But that’s something that rarely affects me.ML: Jim Elliott menti
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ed the Unicode support. Being a Java programmer, I sorely miss that feature. In every other regard, I continue to be surprised by what emacs can do or be taught to do. I suppose the quantity of .emacs files and chunks of LISP code out there are a testament to the stability of this editor.DC: There are things I’d like to see, but what you find is they’re in the works. An easier approach to character encoding is one, and that’s coming in Emacs 22.ESR: Not since tramp.el got integrated and made remote editing easy. That was the last item on my wishlist.Do you think it odd that there are certain parts of functionality that are only available through shell commands – spelling, for example – do you think these should be embedded to help emacs become even more of a one stop shop?ML: Well, I’ve never used emacs for a text editor, so those shell-escaped features never got in my way. Features like spelling certainly would be welcome, but I don’t think that has a big influence on the folks who are picking up emacs–certainly not on the folks who continue to use it.ESR: No opinion. I laugh at spellcheckers, and I’m not sure what other things fall in this category.DC: Spellchecking is embedded now with ispell and flyspell.JJE: I think we show ispell does a really good job of deeply integrating the spell checking process into the Emacs experience. There’s no reason not to take advantage of external processes for things like this. That’s always been the Emacs (and Unix) philosophy; don’t reinvent things that you can leverage instead.BR: I think that’s really just a question of demand. If people want spell checking as a built-in command, it’s pretty easy to extend emacs to make that happen through the ability to pipe text through a process.Emacs has itself become either the source or inspiration of a few other GNU projects (GNU info, for example). Do you see this as a dilution or an endorsement of the technology built into emacs?ML: I see it as an endorsement, definitely.ESR: An endorsement, fairly obviously.DC: An endorsement, of course. Emacs is the grandaddy of ’em all.JJE: Endorsement, definitely! You can’t be sure something is useful until it’s been reused at least three times.BR: Certainly it’s an endorsement. GNU emacs contains a lot of code that is quite useful elsewhere. One example of this is the process checkpointing routine (unexec). I wrote an article, about a zillion years ago in a short-lived journal called SuperUser, about interesting uses for unexec.Emacs is something of a behemoth compared to solutions like vi and nano, do you think this makes new users – of Linux particularly – loathe to use it, when it’s often not included as part of the basic installation tool set (for example Gentoo and others)?ML: I’m sure it has an effect on new users. But vi isn’t a piece of cake, either! The new folks that I have seen picking up emacs are doing it to follow others they see using it and enjoying. They go looking for it. If it’s not installed, that simply adds one step to the process–a step we cover in the book for several platforms, by the way.DC: Once upon a time Emacs was the only behemoth, but now that’s pretty common and the build process is easy for Linux if it’s not included or if the version included isn’t the latest. There are easy installs for other platforms too, so you can use Emacs no matter what platform you might be (forced into) using at the moment. I run it on three platforms.JJE: There used to be some truth to this criticism, remember the old jokes about what Emacs stood for, like “Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping”? But the rest of the computing world has long ago swept by. Emacs is now tiny and tight compared to much software people encounter. Have you looked at Word lately?ESR: Don’t ask me to think like a new user; I’m afraid I’m far too aged in evil for that.BR: Perhaps, yes.Does everybody here have the same nervous C-x C-s twitch while working in other non-emacs editors that I do?ML: Daily! That’s why I had to switch the shortcuts in Eclipse.ESR: Heh. No. Actually, I have both emacs and vi reflexes in my fingers, and I almost never cross up in either direction.DC: Well, Emacs is so good at saving your work in an pinch that I get nervous only if I’m using something else.JJE: I only tend to get tripped up when I encounter environments people have set up where one editor is trying to pretend to be another. Usually the context is enough for me to reach for the right keys. One thing I very much enjoy about Mac OS X is the way that the standard Apple frameworks used to build modern applications (the ones that came from NeXTStep) all support basic Emacs key bindings.You say at the start that you weren’t able to include everything you wanted; emacs includes its own programming language which you only touch on for example – but is there anything that didn’t make it into the book that you really, really wanted to include?ML: I think we managed to cover all of my big ticket items. I’m really happy with the coverage provided for folks learning Emacs. I still use it myself for reminders on the .emacs configuration and font control.DC: Probably what I would have most liked to include and couldn’t in this rev was Emacspeak, the voice interface to Emacs.JJE: Deb was the primary driving force behind what got into the third edition.BR: More on LISP and extensibility, certainly. We had to stick to the fundamentals and only take it so far.The logistics of five authors for one book must have been interesting?ML: Actually, with Deb Cameron managing things, it was quite simple. She did a fantastic job–and did a majority of the new work in this edition herself. Jim Elliott and I both worked with her on the second edition of the Java Swing book and had no trouble jumping in to help her finish this book.ESR: No, it was like one of those album sessions you read about where through the magic of multi-track recording the band members never actually have to be in the same studio at the same time. I only wrote two chapters, fairly cleanly separated from the rest of the book, and never had to interact with the other four authors much.JJE: It worked very well; Deb’s great at coordinating this sort of thing, and she, Marc and I had worked together in the past on the Java Swing effort.BR: Well, we were brought on at different times to do different pieces of the book, so it wasn’t a big deal. I wrote roughly the last half of the first edition; the only other author at the time was Deb Cameron. The other authors came along later.Are any of you working on any new titles we should keep our eyes peeled for?ML: I’m happily on a writing hiatus, but that never seems to last long.DC: I’m editing the latest edition of O’Reilly’s Java Enterprise in a Nutshell, a revolutionary revision of that book that includes the best of open source tools in addition to the standard stuff. Check out this article.JJE: I know that Hibernate: A Developer’s Notebook needs to be revised to cover Hibernate 3. I am hoping to find time to do that this summer or fall, but it’s been a hard year so far because of some health issues in my family. I miss writing! But other things are sometimes more important.BR: I currently write a newsletter on Digital Rights Management called DRM Watch (www.drmwatch.com). It’s published by Jupitermedia, and it’s a free weekly email subscription. It provides balanced coverage of the subject; I’m somewhere to the left of Big Media and to the right of the EFF.ESR: I’m going to do a fourth edition of “The New Hacker’s Dictionary” sometime soon.Author BiosMarc LoyMarc Loy is a trainer and media specialist in Madison, WI. When he’s not working with digital video and DVDs, he’s programming in Java. He can still be found teaching the odd Perl and Java course out in Corporate America, but even on the road he’ll have his PowerBook and a video project
with him.James ElliottJames Elliott is a senior software engineer at Berbee, with fifteen years professional experience as a systems developer. He started designing with objects well before work environments made it convenient, and has a passion for building high-quality Java tools and frameworks to simplify the tasks of other developers.Bill RosenblattBill Rosenblatt is president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a New York-based management consulting firm whose clients include content providers and media technology companies ranging from startups to Fortune 100 firms.Bill’s other titles for O’Reilly are Learning the Korn Shell and (with Cameron Newham) Learning Bash. He is also the author of Digital RightsManagement: Business and Technology (John Wiley & Sons) and editor of the Jupitermedia newsletter DRM Watch (www.drmwatch.com).Debra CameronDebra Cameron is president of Cameron Consulting. In addition to her love for Emacs, Deb researches and writes about emerging technologies and their applications. She is the author of Optical Networking: A Wiley Tech Brief, published by John Wiley & Sons, which covers the practical applications and politics of optical networking.Deb also edits O’Reilly titles, including Java Enterprise in a Nutshell, Java in a Nutshell, JavaScript in a Nutshell, Essential SNMP, Cisco IOS in a Nutshell, TCP/IP Network Administration, Java Security, Java Swing, Learning Java, and Java Performance Tuning.Eric S RaymondEric is an Open Source evangelist and author of the highly influential paper “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” He can be contacted through his website, Eric S. Raymond