GNU Emacs Reviews & Product Details

GNU Emacs is a customizable text and code editor used for programming, editing files, and handling text-heavy work. Its keyboard-driven workflow and extensibility let users bring editing, coding, and related tasks into one environment.

What company sizes and industries is GNU Emacs the best fit for?

GNU Emacs is a strong fit for technical work across small businesses, mid-market organizations, and enterprises, especially in software and IT-related fields. The most represented positive-review segments include:

Company size — Small Business: Teams with 50 or fewer employees.
Company size — Mid-Market: Organizations with 51–1,000 employees.
Company size — Enterprise: Organizations with more than 1,000 employees.
Industry — Computer Software: Software development and related work.
Industry — Information Technology and Services: Technical and IT services work.
Industry — Higher Education and Research: Academic, research, and related technical work.

What customer support options does GNU Emacs provide, and how do users find the overall support experience?

GNU Emacs support is often found through its community and documentation, and the experience can be uneven. Community expertise and built-in documentation help users find answers, though learning resources and guidance for getting started can be difficult to navigate.

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Ganesh G.

Senior Software Engineer

Information Technology and Services

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

1/9/2026

"Highly Configurable and Extensible Platform"

5/5

What do you like best about GNU Emacs?

Everything is configurable and extensible Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?

Learning curve is very low and its take lot of time to figure out things. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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Verified User in Banking

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

7/9/2024

"Power and flexibility"

5/5

What do you like best about GNU Emacs?

Power. Flexibility.

I love to able to do everything in the same software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?

Lack of interaction with other users.

No availability to install in work. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Harshit G.

Freelancer

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

7/2/2022

"A genuinely good open source text editor for Unix"

4/5

What do you like best about GNU Emacs?

Open source, built in. It works like charm for Linux-based operating systems. It is very simple to use. It is possible to do real-time edits, a classic editor and it is very customizable as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?

While GNU emacs is legacy software, it isn't meant for everyone, especially the new GUI-loving generation. Needless to say, it has a comparatively steeper learning curve if you are accustomed to GUI editors. Also, compared to those fancy GUI editors, its functionalities are somewhat limited. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:

If you have not worked on it before, you may want to try other open-source GUI editors instead. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?

GNU Emacs helps me and my organization to seamlessly edit and maintain important configuration files in our Linux server. Not only that but GNU Emacs is also a primary text editor on our Linux server thus all text editing tasks are made possible through it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Computer Software

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

5/24/2022

"Emacs: The holy grail for code editing?"

4/5

What do you like best about GNU Emacs?

Emacs and VIM are the text-only editors that are commonly used across Linux environments. Sometimes when you ssh into a machine there is no GUI editors available and you often reach for an editor like this. This is what I like best about emacs. It's usually installed on every machine and makes it easy to edit a variety of file formats on a remote machine. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?

Some people use Emacs as a daily driver, but I do not. There are too many nice GUI features that editors like sublime, vscode have that emacs does not have out of the box. If you are on a GUI desktop I prefer not to use emacs since it is text only. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:

If you are editing files a lot on remote machines you should try Emacs. It has a learning curve, but you will become very efficient the more you learn. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?

The problem I solve using GNU emacs is editing files on remote Linux machines. It makes it easy to log into deployed infrastructure and edit files since it is usually installed on most Linux distros. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Phil C.

Community Volunteer

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

Originally submitted 12/7/2015

"GNU emacs is wonderful OS , it just miss a good editor ... jk"

5/5

What do you like best about GNU Emacs?

One feature, I don't know in other editor, is the ability to run subshell inside the editor, M-x rgrep M-x compile etc ... I also enjoy using fantastic modes like org-mode to manage notes... tramp is a cool utility to visit remote filesystems (ssh, ftp). magit worth to be used if you use git. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?

It's unclear over version to maintain configuration, usually I split my configs files and load them on purpose. debugging inside editor is not that easy, the mail client is counter intuitive, ie If I just want to open an IMAP url , I'll have to define a bunch of variables. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:

try to use xemacs or emacs with menu , until you learn the basic keystrokes, if vim user then use elvis mode which provide compatible vi key shortcuts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?

I made a script to trace allocations , and share the location of the new / delete using c++ macro , then I am able to switch to one line if file to an other ... I think I could other many other tools, but as far as I know org-mode is only supported by emacs and this is a reason to keep using it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Zhaorong M.

Programmer

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

Originally submitted 4/16/2019

"My favorite IDE -- or I'd say OS ;)"

5/5

What do you like best about GNU Emacs?

Fully-configurable. You can configure anything - Theme, syntax highlighter, checker, menu options, keyboard shortcuts. Cross-platform and consistent experience. I have a GitHub repository with .emacs.d for Emacs configuration accessible on any operating system. Active and expert community. Emacs community is supportive and experienced. Emacs is older than me, so are many Emacs developers. :) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?

A steep learning curve at the beginning. In fact, I gave up Emacs twice before I fell in love with it the third time and decided to commit to it for the foreseeable future. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:

The built-in tutorial is interactive and easy to follow. Just do not get frustrated. You will be rewarded generously. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use it mainly as a Python IDE, but I also use it to write NSIS scripts, C++ from time to time. I also use org-mode extensively as a TODO list and a notebook in general. It boosts my coding experience and productivity. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ankit K.

Senior Software Engineer

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

3/8/2022

"An Amazing Text Editor With Sub Shell"

4/5

What do you like best about GNU Emacs?

GNU Emacs is a powerful editor which provides the facility of an in-built sub-shell. It supports UNICODE fully. Everything can be done which can be done using any modern IDE. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?

It lacks good documentation. The repositories are scattered. It requires a lot of considerable time to learn working on GNU Emacs and that too, shortcuts are not easy to remember. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Jerry C.

Head of Bioinformatics and Software

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

Originally submitted 8/18/2021

"My go-to code editor when I SSH into a remote server"

4/5

What do you like best about GNU Emacs?

Emacs is easy to install on a Linux machine and works great as an editor when you are logged into a remote server in a command-line Terminal. Other editors such as Atom, Sublime, Eclipse and VSCode need to use an SSH tunnel for work on a remote server, which is very inconvenient and prone to connection issues. I mostly code in Python, and Emacs has nice color coding and styling for Python code. And shortcuts are great in Emacs Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?

The only drawback I see is some lack of support for newer languages and libraries. For example, I was trying to find a color-coding package for programming in VueJS, but could not find an appropriate one for Emacs. The community for Emacs is an older bunch, and doesn't always have support and updates for the newest frameworks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Information Technology and Services

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

7/1/2022

"powerful, extensible, not easy"

1/5

What do you like best about GNU Emacs?

keyboard only interaction, extensive libraries, rich macros, same keyboard shortcuts I've used for over 30 years Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?

not exactly easy to learn or discover. integration with modern development systems limited or DIY Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Brian L.

Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

8/17/2021

"From the 80s - still my primary editor"

5/5

What do you like best about GNU Emacs?

Emacs can do anything and the lisp extensions can tune it for any programming language or coding standards Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?

There is a learning curve of the better part of a day Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?

Of course I use it for software development but also so much more. I use emacs org mode to organize nearly everything I do and much of the information I've gathered. I use emacs key bindings for when I type in web text boxes (through the Chrome extension - edit with emacs). Basically I've used the same key bindings for everything since 1985 and there is almost no learning curve when using emacs for another application - just to learn some of the new macros like for debugging, formatting to code standards, etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.