by deafpolygon | 2025-05-23 07:26:08+00:00
I only know my perspective:

I get the appeal of Emacs but this is exactly where it falls short for me. It’s brittle, monolithic, and too controlling (restricting).

Emacs owns the entire platform. If you want to use an external tool, you have to wrap it in Emacs abstractions. That means dealing with buffers, subprocess plumbing, or writing Elisp bindings. You’re not really integrating; you’re translating everything into “Emacs-speak.”

Meanwhile, tools outside Emacs—like in a Unix shell—are composable by default. I can swap fzf for peco, tesseract for ocrmypdf, or even Neovim for Helix without rewriting my entire environment. That’s real modularity. With Emacs, everything is wired together internally, so small changes can break big things.

And yeah, I can technically replicate workflows inside Emacs, but often it’s reinventing worse versions of tools I already have—eshell instead of zsh, eww instead of a browser, magit instead of plain git in a terminal. That makes it feel more like a self-contained OS than a part of the system.

I’d rather keep my editor focused and compose my environment around it—not inside it. Plus, I rather do certain things in Lua, Python, shell, etc. where I can call it and run it through awk, sed, rg/grep, and so on. I can port that to any other platform and adapt it quickly rather than try to rewrite Lisp.

So... to answer your points specifically --

Do you use your editor to read and annotate pdfs? -- Sure. Using my PDF editor.

Or watch videos? -- I think that's a little easier in shell (mpv, vlc) or directly in a browser.

Or manage the library of your ebooks? -- Calibre

Or track your expenses? -- I have a tool for that.

Or control project management like Jira? -- Jira or their respective tool(s).

Or keep your knowledge base and note-taking? -- Neovim+Lua

Or interact with LLMs? -- There's a shell script for that, browser, or the ChatGPT application.

Or explore APIs like Postman? -- curl, wget, ... or Postman itself.

Or keep your spaced repetition flash cards like Anki? -- Inside Anki. I have a simple shell tool that goes through them as well.

Or use it for chat over platforms like Telegram and Slack? -- In their respective apps?

Or find and read RFCs and manpages? -- My browser, or the shell.

Or to perform web-search, search through your browser history, Wikipedia, Youtube? -- I think it's called a browser. Or the shell.

Do you have etymology lookup, thesaurus, dictionaries, translation? -- Browser. Or the shell.

Or to order pizza? -- Browser. Or the shell.

Or measure distances between coordinates on a map? -- You got me there.

Automate things based on solar calendar or moon phases? -- You got me here, too. I don't have a need for this.

Manage all your configs, aka dotfiles? -- stow, git

List, browse and code review Pull Requests, -- browser, git

etc. -- etc.

etc. -- etc.

Now tell me, what a sane person ever exposed to all this usefulness would ever reject it? -- I feel like I answered this.

Only those who never had patience to reach it, or those who are oblivious to the possibilities. -- I'm aware.

Thanks, this was an entertaining 10 minutes to write.