The other day, I saw a tweet pointing at a post from 2013 by Chris Done. It was sort of interesting so I added it to my blog queue. Since then, I’ve seen several more tweets mentioning it so perhaps everyone has seen it by now. Just in case you missed it, the post’s theme was that Emacs users are like Terry Pratchett’s Igor Clan.

Igors were characters from Pratchett’s Discworld series who were experts at surgery and routinely replaced their own body parts, making repairs and improvements. That last phrase should tell you why Done thinks Emacs users are like the Igors: they are always changing and improving their editor in the same way that the Igors are always changing and improving themselves.

His thesis is that because Emacs has an extension language in which the majority of the system is written, it’s easy for each user to move things around, modify parts, and add new things to suit themselves. He says that the Rudolf Winestock’s famous Lisp Curse—Lisp’s extraordinarily expressive power leads to programmer isolation—doesn’t apply to Emacs because, after all, your editing environment is yours alone and doesn’t have to satisfy anyone but yourself.

Done’s experience is much like mine: he came to Emacs from Common Lisp and came to see it not as an editor but as a programming environment—or as I like to say, a light weight Lisp Machine. While I don’t have any interest in routinely rearranging my body parts, I do enjoy doing it to my editor.