Protesilaos Stavrou has a very nice, detailed video that addresses the question of switching to Emacs. His approach to Emacs is, it seems to me, the correct one. He starts by stating—emphatically—that Emacs is not an editor; it’s a Lisp interpreter. That means you can make it do whatever you want: email, RSS, calendar, music, even text editing if you want.

His second point is little appreciated and much more controversial: the default Emacs keys are not that crazy. It’s not an easy case to make, especially when compared to Vim. While Vim has a logical set of composable commands that are easy to learn, Emacs’ key sequences seem random but are mnemonic once you learn the design principals. Still, Stavrou makes a reasonable case. They’re definitely not as easy or logical as Vim’s but they do have a certain tractive logic.

The most unusual part of Stavrou’s presentation is his list of reasons why you might not want to change to Emacs. It won’t, he says, make you cool or give you social acceptance. At the end of the day, no one cares whether or not you use Emacs. Not your employers and not your colleagues. In particular he says that if your current work flow is working for you, there’s no reason at all to switch to Emacs.

His final point is that Emacs requires commitment. You can’t be an “Emacs tourist.” Mastering it will take effort and won’t happen over the weekend. I see this realization a lot from people who have tried several times to adopt Emacs but couldn’t make it stick. It was only when they fully committed using Emacs all the time that they got over the initial hump and made Emacs their own.

The video is an hour long so you’ll definitely need to schedule time but I found it enjoyable and worth the time.