Evangelist (Latter Day Saints)
Emacs refers to a class of text editors, primarily for UNIX systems. Emacs editors are generally known for their large number of features, not all of which relate to editing text, and for its sometimes convoluted keyboard commands.
Sourced
- An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU Emacs would never make a good program.
- Linus Torvalds, Linux 1.3.53 CodingStyle documentation
- Emacs is undoubtedly the most powerful programmer's editor in existence. It's a big, feature-laden program with a great deal of flexibility and customizability. As we observed in the Chapter 14 section on Emacs Lisp, Emacs has an entire programming language inside it that can be used to write arbitrarily powerful editor functions.
- Eric S. Raymond, The Art of UNIX Programming
Unsourced
- Don't get me wrong: Emacs is a great operating system – it lacks a good editor, though.
- Thomer M. Gil
- 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.
- Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning … was the Command Line
- I use Emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
- Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning … was the Command Line
- I'm writing this article with software called XEmacs. The program is unlike any other word processor I've ever encountered. In addition to cutting and pasting text, XEmacs can run other programs; send electronic mail; browse the World Wide Web; retrieve, edit, and send files across the Internet; and keep track of appointments. It's like a digital Swiss army knife.
- Charles C. Mann, Atlantic Monthly
- A novice of the temple once approached the Chief Priest with a question. "Master, does Emacs have the Buddha nature?" the novice asked. The Chief Priest had been in the temple for many years and could be relied upon to know these things. He thought for several minutes before replying. "I don't see why not. It's got bloody well everything else." With that, the Chief Priest went to lunch. The novice suddenly achieved enlightenment, several years later.
- Bill Sommerfeld, to the current-users@netbsd.org mailing list
- The purpose of a windowing system is to put some amusing fluff around your one almighty emacs window.
- Mark on gnu.emacs.help
- Emacs is the ground. We run around and act silly on top of it, and when we die, may our remnants grace its ongoing incrementation.
- Thien-Thi Nguyen, comp.emacs
- Emacs is an acronym for Escape Meta Alt Control Shift.
- Emacs is an acronym for "Editor for Middle-Aged Computer Scientists".
- XKCD references Emacs: http://www.xkcd.com/378/
- Emacs is an acronym for Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping. http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/gnuemacs.acro.exp.html