In the Age of AI Writing Tools, I Picked Emacs for My Sci-Fi Novel

6 months ago by Drew to c/emacs

solrize 20 points 6 months ago

Neal Stephenson in 1999, "In the beginning was the command line":

In the GNU/Linux world there are two major text editing programs: the minimalist vi (known in some implementations as elvis) and the maximalist emacs. I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

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eldavi 1 point 6 months ago

emacs is a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor. lol

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tusharhero 5 points 6 months ago path: 0 22033375 22033547 22043953, hotness: undefined, score: 5, children: 6
eldavi 3 points 6 months ago

i wouldn't know and i hold nothing against it. i shared my previous comment because it was the funniest part of the vi vs emacs holy wars that use to dominate online discourse about it.

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tusharhero 2 points 6 months ago

@eldavi I guess I have just become sick of hearing it again and again every time emacs comes up.

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EdHamilton 2 points 5 months ago

@crmsnbleyd from what I have experienced asking Google Gemini questions about family history research, AI produces science fiction without even trying.

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