Bozhidar Batsov:

Every now and again I come across some discussion on making Emacs “modern”.1 The argument always go more or less like this - Emacs doesn’t look and behave like and the world will end if we don’t copy something “crucial” from it…

If you ask me - there’s pretty much nothing we can do that would suddenly make Emacs as popular as VS Code. But you know what - that’s perfectly fine. After all there are plenty of “modern” editors that are even less popular than Emacs, so clearly being “modern” doesn’t make you popular. And there’s also our “arch-nemesis” vim, that’s supposedly as “dated” as Emacs, but is extremely popular.

Josh Stella:

For those who haven’t used Emacs, it’s something you’ll likely hate, but may love. It’s sort of a Rube Goldberg machine the size of a house that, at first glance, performs all the functions of a toaster. That hardly sounds like an endorsement, but the key phrase is “at first glance.” Once you grok Emacs, you realize that it’s a thermonuclear toaster that can also serve as the engine for… well, just about anything you want to do with text.

This project provides a tiny .emacs file to set up Emacs quickly. This document provides a detailed description of how to set it up and get started with Emacs.

Further this project also provides a tiny convenience command named em to start Emacs server and edit files using Emacs server. This helps in using Emacs efficiently.

Yaron Wittenstein recaps the editor holy wars then tells his personal journey with the two editors and how he found a happy place somewhere in-between:

emacs has a very popular vim emulation named evil (branded as The extensible vi layer for Emacs). I was skeptical at first but gave it a try, and surprisingly things went smooth.

org-web lets you directly edit your org files online. It syncs with Dropbox and Google Drive and is optimized for mobile use.

Lovers of Emac’s Org mode have already clicked the title link and are checking this thing out. For the rest of us, here’s a demo video of org-web in action.

Two beloved worlds collide:

an extension for Visual Studio Code inspired by the venerable Org mode for Emacs. Org lets you keep notes, maintain TODO lists, and author documents, all in plain text.

It comes with a disclaimer: “(In Progress, contributions are welcome)”