Why “Emacs” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
The best thing that my PhD advisor did was to require me to learn emacs and latex, 32 years ago.
by bsoles · Oct 28, 2026
I programmed in Emacs in a myriad of different languages, I used it to write my thesis, to write my homework and later to grade them. I’ve used it to publish countless blog arti…
by RedCinnabar · Oct 28, 2026
> Is anybody here consciously trying to keep their Emacs configs/setup "lean", minimalist, as small as possible? How small? I try for things to not get out of control and a…
by TacticalCoder · Oct 28, 2026
Kinda, I don't mind having quite a few packages but they are mostly self-contained in their use-package blocks. This way even if things go wrong it's usually just one package I…
by ghosty141 · Oct 28, 2026
I was lucky enough to have access to TOPS-20 at WPI in 1986 - 1988 (The DEC-20 was replaced with an Encore Multimax running UNIX as the student mainframe). TOPS-20 had a bunch o…
by jhallenworld · Oct 28, 2026
Emacs is designed so only the most core operations are in C. Everything else is in ELisp, and can be manipulated to your heart's content while Emacs is running. It's pretty simi…
by skeledrew · Oct 28, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "emacs" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "emacs" over time.
Emacs, originally named EMACS, is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on GNU Emacs, directly descended from the original, is ongoing; its latest version is 31.1 , released 24 August 2026. Read more on Wikipedia