The Emacs pastoral tradition

Emacs users may come from career backgrounds or intellectual disciplines that have almost nothing to do with software or computers in general, but they have simply found their way into the “cult” of Emacs from pursuits like:

• Academics
• Writing and literature
• Civics
• Philosophy
• Law
• Medicine
• Music

(And more, I’m sure.)

I’ll use myself as an example. In my technical writing career I was searching for a more optimized text editor. I started learning vim, but switched to Emacs because, as it turns out, I wasn’t looking for a text editor so much as an “operating system” for writing.

Emacs could be more than a text editor. It could be an organizer, a scratchpad, a dictionary, a canvas, a database, a calendar, an email client, and much more. What should have been work started to feel like fun.

This is what I’ve started calling the Emacs pastoral tradition.

Pastoral themes in literature evoke images of shepherds ostensibly tending to a flock, but really engaging in more leisurely pursuits like writing poetry and music. The point being that it’s the leisurely pursuits that uplift the soul and are thus more important than mere toil, even if toil is useful and productive.

Emacs is a kind of playground where we can bring our unique ideas and favorite hobbyhorses and have fun building systems around them.

The pastoral also applies to the church: the pastor as the shepherd, and the ones being sermonized to as the flock. Emacs is already jokingly referred to as a cult, so I need not belabor this point.

What we do in Emacs can look a lot like work, and sometimes it is, but often it’s leisure disguised as work.

This might include:

• Writing a blog post in Org Mode (as I’m doing now).
• Tweaking your init.el file to approach that ever-illusive perfect configuration.
• Auditioning new packages out of curiosity.
• Trying to play Doom or surf the web in Emacs.

I’d go so far as to say that there are some entire projects out there, such as EXWM, that can be described as leisure.

Does anyone really need an Emacs window manager? No, but that’s the point. It’s an aesthetic choice rather than a purely rational one. An Emacs window manager is no more useful than any other.

I’ll paraphrase Roger Scruton in saying:

There’s nothing quite as useful as the truly useless.

But even useless pursuits can be useful, even if the only useful aspect is the fun of leisurely non-productivity.

Emacs pursuits can be productive endeavors, but they need not be in order to justify our time.

There are lots of productivity tools out there that are probably better than Org Mode. Or, at the very least, an intelligent critic could make an impassioned case for why Org Mode is lame, with multiple bullet points and peer-reviewed references; but it would not be persuasive at all to a sufficiently dedicated Org user.

For Emacs users, the user-friendliness or usefulness of the tool is the not the key point. The promise of endless tinkering is more tantalizing than a tool that simply works all the time. That’s why we’re always tweaking but never really landing on a static configuration. Emacs itself is a running Lisp image you can manipulate on the fly. At this level of interaction, the margins between work, experimentation, and play become invisible, or at least quite porous.

Some people believe we may on the cusp on a new era of non-production. You know as well as I do that there’s more hype than substance around AI at the moment. However, in the brave new world, there’s a non-zero chance that the machines will take over all the toil and leave us free to indulge in a new age of pastoral leisure. Sitting under shady trees and composing romantic sonnets in iambic pentameter sounds pretty good to me.

For people who derive value and validation from productivity, this is a threat. But for Emacs users it might be what we’ve always wanted.

If you enjoyed this ramble, here are some next steps for your consideration:

• Let me know if you’d like to beta read and provide feedback on my hacker novel.
• Check out my eBooks: Emacs For Writers and Git For Writers.
• Subscribe to my newsletter for occasional updates from me about similar topics.

Thanks for reading. See you next time!