Emacs Quotes & Sayings

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. — Neal Stephenson

Calling EMACS an editor is like calling the Earth a hunk of dirt. — Chris DiBona

People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking. — Richard Stallman

Emacs is a nice operating system, but I prefer UNIX. — Tom Christiansen

It's probably fair to say that the ratio of time our Connector developers spend in the debugger versus the Emacs buffer is higher than with most software. — Nat Friedman

Emacs is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. — Neal Stephenson

VI was predecessor to hundreds of word processing systems. By now, Unix folks see it as a bit stodgy - it hasn't the versatility of Gnu-Emacs, nor the friendliness of more modern editors. Despite that, VI shows up on every Unix system. — Clifford Stoll

The principal lesson of Emacs is that a language for extensions should not be a mere "extension language". It should be a real programming language, designed for writing and maintaining substantial programs. Because people will want to do that! — Richard Stallman

I think psychoanalyze-pinhead is the important lesson of GNU Emacs. — Todd Bennett

When the ANSI C standard was under development, the pragma directive was introduced. Borrowed from Ada, #pragma is used to convey hints to the compiler, such as the desire to expand a particular function in-line or suppress range checks. Not previously seen in C, pragma met with some initial resistance from a gcc implementor, who took the "implementation-defined" effect very literally - in gcc version 1.34, the use of pragma causes the compiler to stop compiling and launch a computer game instead! The gcc manual contained the following: The "#pragma" command is specified in the ANSI standard to have an arbitrary implementation-defined effect. In the GNU C preprocessor, "#pragma" first attempts to run the game "rogue"; if that fails, it tries to run the game "hack"; if that fails, it tries to run GNU Emacs displaying the Tower of Hanoi; if that fails, it reports a fatal error. In any case, preprocessing does not continue. - Manual for version 1.34 of the GNU C compiler — Peter Van Der Linden

My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine. — Donald Knuth

Over the past decade Stallman created a powerful editing program called Gnu-Emacs. But Gnu's much more than just a text editor. It's easy to customize to your personal preferences. It's a foundation upon which other programs can be built. It even has its own mail facility built in. Naturally, our physicists demanded Gnu; with an eye to selling more computing cycles, we installed it happily. — Clifford Stoll

It doesn't take special talents to reproduce
even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of. It helps more people, too. — Richard Stallman

No person, no idea, and no religion deserves to be illegal to insult, not even the Church of Emacs. — Richard Stallman

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

An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program. — Linus Torvalds

EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight. — Richard Stallman