Jeremy Friesen hosts this month’s Emacs Carnival, and the topic is “Your Elevator Pitch for Emacs”.

It took me a couple of days to come up with a useful angle, because I didn’t even consider Emacs pitch-able. But that’s what’s so cool about writing prompts like these – you can think outside the box.

So here’s mine:

If you like working and thinking with text, you will love Emacs: anything you want your computer to do, Emacs can do in text form.

That probably raises some eyebrows during the elevator ride in the imaginary company headquarters for Amazing Company Inc.: “What do you mean, anything?”

Well, think of Emacs like a rich-text editor first. Like Microsoft Word. You can write, mark-up your text for lists and emphasis, have images. It’s probably ugly for you by default, but you can make it very comfortable and minimalistically modern-looking, so that you don’t lose yourself in the nested ribbon toolbars. So imagine that now you have a writing experience you like.

Are they still with me? The next part depends on their job at Amazing Company Inc., but I’d pull from a collection of potentially relevant tasks at work.

You feel comfortable and at home when you write. And then you tell Emacs to also do your email, with the same feeling – after all, it’s just text you read and send; just like company Slack, which you also attend to in Emacs, because you find the web interface irksome; and then you file invoices that you need to process automatically; and you write your to-do lists and reminders with it; and read the news like you did with Pocket/Instapaper/…; and contribute to the company wiki; and manage database records interactively; and teach it to plot graphs and charts from the CSV exports for the quarterly results presentation; …

So after listing something that doesn’t sound like an intuitive use case, I expect the follow-up: “Why would I want to do that if we have dedicated software for this?”

Is it asked with a genuine sense of curiosity? Or meant to ridicule, maybe to look good in front of the colleagues that don’t get it, to not submit to such lunacy? It doesn’t matter, the answer is just the same:

Because you value your sanity. Because you’re tired from all the web services updating their UI every other week, rearranging core features, presenting you with chatbots and pop-up explainers to absentmindedly click away, but eating at your productivity and the comfort of knowing what you’re doing nevertheless, diminishing your sense of agency. Because you began to loathe software some time ago, who knows when that started.

Maybe the last part is a bit of a stretch. Watch their eyes before you go that far. Their eyes tell whether you’re onto something. And we are onto something, aren’t we?

You’re a professional. You’re good at what you do. Could you also be happier doing it? Could you reclaim a corner of the computer from which you command excellence?

Dramatic pause.

This is your ticket out of that grind. Bring under your control what you want or need to do. Teach the computer your work, and then have it work for you, not the other way around.

Avoid spelling out the web link in an actual conversation. But do read Mike’s piece next. Happy carnivalling.