--- title: GNU Emacs Reviews meta_title: 'GNU Emacs Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 84 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how GNU Emacs works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.5 review_count: 84 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-13' parent_category: name: Editor url: https://www.g2.com/categories/editor --- # GNU Emacs Reviews **Vendor:** FreeCAD **Category:** [Text Editor Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/text-editor) **Average Rating:** 4.5/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 84 ## About GNU Emacs GNU Emacs is a customizable text editor that is an interpreter and dialect with extension to support text editing with content-sensitive editing modes, built-in documentation, Unicode support, and more. ## GNU Emacs Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users love the **customizability** of GNU Emacs, allowing for extensive personal and functional adjustments. (1 reviews) - Users value the **extensive customization options** of GNU Emacs, enabling tailored workflows and personalized environments. (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users often find the **complexity of GNU Emacs** frustrating, as it takes time to learn and figure out its features. (1 reviews) - Users find the **learning difficulty** of GNU Emacs frustrating, requiring significant time to master its functionalities. (1 reviews) ## GNU Emacs Reviews ### 1. Emcas - Best console based Editor **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Munendra S. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 14, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** GNU Emacs is extensible, highly customizable and console based editor. Lots of packages are available for customization and own packages for emacs can be written using Emacs Lisp. Emacs is available both as command line editor and GUI based editor. Available on different platforms with good support. Switching from vim is easy since, vim emulation is available in Emacs. Multiple buffers can be open simultaneously. hence, editing between the files is easy. Integration with different programming languages. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Emacs has too many commands, over 2000 commands. For command based, takes time for user to learn keyboard binding. Even though, Emacs is available on different platforms, it is mainly for linux distributions. Windows version of emacs is not same as its linux version. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** If your looking for console based editor Emacs is the one for you. Emacs is customizable and many packages are available. Good online support. Multi-buffer is supported hence, increased productivity. Better than vim because of available integration of programming languages. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** Currently, Working on Django based application. Emacs is console based editor and easily customizable. For the work, Emacs is customized for Python, Auto-filling and syntax-highlighting. Benefits: Many additional packages for customization (for Python, php and other programming languages) Multi-buffer support (hence, less switching between the terminals) Can be operated using only keyboard. Custom themes for Editor ### 2. Amazing! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anurag P. | Senior Software Engineer, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 05, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Extreme level of customizability and power. Each and everything can be changed to match your taste. Mouse less control. Best Vi emulation via evil mode. Very powerful plugins (like helm). Support for DB, file management and REPL for all languages, org-mode for GTD and Tramp for remote file editing. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Slow to start, specially when a lot a options are enabled. But once started, it works blazing fast. Pretty complicated key combinations, I use Evil mode to use Vi key combinations. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Definitely a must for all programmers who like mouse less editor. Vim users should also check it out once. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** Significant increase in personal productivity. Increase in code quality with better formatted code and less syntactical errors without actually executing the code. ### 3. Quick, easy, customizable **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Networking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 02, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** It's simple to use, and easy to customize/find extensions **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Not as simple for jumping around in code as an ide **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** Editing code ### 4. emacs is extensible **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anatoliy S. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 25, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** With emacs, I can do all my work task using one platform. It's quite good if you have to deal with a lot of languages and technologies, especially if they are open source. - All my work tasks are executed at one platform - I can record macro and repeaters for often operations - very good built-in documentation **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** I can't say I dislike anything in emacs. One thing, It just requires a time to get used to, and could be not suitable to work with some proprietary technologies, since it's extensions usually built for open source tools. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** - easy to work with different languages - convenient tools for ssh access - best GIT support - best best scheduler\TODO task tracker - good integration with *nix shells - very good with email - a lot of other useful tools ### 5. Editor for people that cherish learning **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lukasz C. | Fullstack Developer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 25, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** One word: extensibility. You can have your editor tailored to suit your particular needs in every aspect. Whether you need full-blown IDE for only one language, or something to write quickly your thoughts, Emacs can become that editor. Whether you come from VIM, Notepad, Nano, Visual Studio or RubyMine, Emacs can emulate exactly what you liked best in your previous editors and still bring much more to the table. Built-in package manager will help you quickly get what you need. Writing your own extension might be a bit more difficult for non-programmer, but if you get it, you will have editor you won't leave for a long time. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Default keybindings. As they predate those that are commonly used in web browsers or other editors, they are not exactly intuitive. But fear not - you can easily customize anything. You can even make Emacs work with Vi-like editor modes (check out Spacemacs for that particular aspect). **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Use internet - look for other people's configuration files. Read them. Get to know Emacs. Spend some time learning it. Don't get overwhelmed or discouraged by needing to learn a bit of Elisp. If you can't manage to write your own configuration, look for configuration suites like Spacemacs. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm programmer. I write software and need to make that as efficiently as possible. I need editor that lets me organize my thoughts, and code quickly. It needs to be distraction-free with quick startup. For me. emacs is all that. Using it, I can get code written faster then any before. ### 6. Review by researcher **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 15, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** I like the short key entries and the look of it **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** I dislike when short key entries get mix out and I cant escape. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** Just programming. ### 7. Emacs is the alpha and omega of text editors **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Patrick E. | Teaching Assistant, Research, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** The best thing about emacs is its customizabilitiy, although as a description "customizable" hardly seems adequate. Emacs isn't quite like a swiss army knife, because that implies a certain number of limitations. It's usable out of the box, but it provides you with a practically bottomless toolbox. You can (and will) create your own tailored beast to help you accomplish any and every task under the sun associated with text editing. It's not just limited to text-editing either! The old joke about emacs is that it's practically an OS, but just lacks a good text editor. There is *some* truth in this. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** There's no getting around this, but emacs is *hard* to learn and *hard* to get used to. The first stumbling block is all of the seemingly arcane keybindings that you have to learn, although once you have these down it helps you to become a lot more efficient. After that, you have to start learning a little bit of emacs lisp if you want to engage in some *real* customization. All of this can be very time-consuming, and learning emacs is difficult to recommend if you're right in the middle of an important project. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Stick with it. Bear in mind when reading this review that I'm not a professional software developer, but I do spend an awful lot of time, both professional and personal, editing text. Learning emacs has been educational, and it has also increased my productivity by a lot. If you're coming from vim, or if you *really* want to put off learning how to customize emacs yourself, I can highly recommend first installing emacs, and then adding spacemacs, as a kind of starter set: https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use emacs for some very specific things, and when it comes to these things, my productivity has gone through the roof. With auctex, emacs can function as the best latex IDE i've ever used, and creating extremely professional looking documents is a ### 8. Light, extensible, an "entire" operating system **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Marcelo C. | Analista de Sistemas, Program Development, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Extensibility. As a lisper, I can use a dialect that also uses S-expressions in order to extend the text editor, and make it work alone, doing all my common tasks, that, by other way, the operating system would do. It has a big amount of plugins. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** I commonly use Vim because I can run it easily anywhere, directly from the terminal, and, unfortunately, I can't say the same about Emacs. Also, the Windows version of Emacs isn't *that good*. Also, it's not as easy as Vim to write syntax highlighters for it, and I really miss that, because I design programming languages. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** When I started with it, I was really lost. I failed to learn Vim on first time, then, I switched to Emacs, to take Vim after. The most annoying thing, just when I started, were the keyboard shortcuts to copy, paste and, the main, undo. My biggest recommendation, and what they recommended to me to is "read the documentation". Emacs isn't a very easy editor to get fast productivity. You need to know it and how to extend it in order to really take advantage of its features, you don't want just one more text editor, do you? **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I develop most of the times in Clojure, Haskell, LiveScript and, unfortunately, PHP, because I develop core applications. The biggest benefit I can see is "to keep only one window open", without anything else consuming my precious memory. ### 9. An Editor that can be customized to all my needs. **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Matthias L. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Emacs is not so much an editor but more an editor-SDK - I can customize and extend and program it in any way I want to have the one editing experience completely tailored to my needs. It has a huge amount of extensions and supports many languages. This allows me to take advantage of the familiar emacs-environment for many tasks. Emacs can be controlled with the keyboard only, so I do not have to switch between keyboard and mouse which lends to less friction and more flow during development and writing. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** The out-of-the-box experience of Emacs is less than ideal - it requires a remarkable amount of customization to make the user-experience match my expectations. The huge amount of functionality and extendability makes me sometimes feel somewhat lost. This situation is compensated by so called "Emacs Starter Kits" of which I highly recommend Spacemacs. This adds extensions of high quality and configures them to make them play nice with each other. It also adds VIM-like key bindings, which compensates for another shortcoming of Emacs: the extensive use of key-combinations with CTRL, ALT and SHIFT could make your fingers hurt over time. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Use a starter-kit. I can recommend Spacemacs. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use Emacs for my everyday programming, as well as for note-taking and documentation. As I can use the same set of key-combinations etc. to work with all kinds of text, I do not have to spent my energy to adjust to different editors, word-processors or programming environments. Emacs plays nicely together with the command line, it allows remote editing, it is unobtrusive and fast. Because of that, it is a good candidate for agile development. ### 10. Emacs is wonderful for programmers **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** 班 . | 开发工程师, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** 1. Emacs is highly customizable. 2. With emacs lisp, you can make many customizes. Emacs lisp is not only a config script for Emacs, it is also a programming language. You will find it's very interesting to have a text editor belongs to yourself. 3. With emacs, you can study a lot of things, instead of complain about how ugly/heavy/slow your current text editor is. 4. Emacs's org-mode is very useful. Even compared to markdown mode. 5. You can make to-do list with Emacs org-mode. 6. Emacs' auto complete for html/xml files is useful, too. 7. With tramp, emacs can edit files on remote server. If you use emacs on windows, you can use plink(from putty) instead of ssh. So you do not need to install cygwin. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** 1. Emacs is hard to learn for beginners. You can get confused with lots of shortcuts. 2. Besides , emacs lisp is hard to learn if you are not a programmer. 3. Emacs's melpa package manager mirrorsite is hard to connect in China. 4. You are the 1% if you use Emacs instead of VS, Qt creator. 5. Many linux distributions do not have emacs by default. So you may find that you can not use emacs every where. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Vim **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am a c++ programmer, and I find Visual Studio is too heavy for me. Emacs runs very fast. I can make customize for myself, with emacs lisp, compile, debug, deploy, very efficient. ### 11. GNU Emacs is my main editor for both text and code **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jack-Benny P. | Owner, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 07, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** You can do everything in GNU Emacs and it has very good syntax support, everything from Python to Markdown and LaTeX Emacs is now my favorite editor after almost 20 years with Vi and Vim. Do note that I still use Vi from time to time. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Takes awhile to get used to, and sometimes it's a bit slow when you have lots of lots of extra stuff **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Take your time to learn the essential key strokes, there are many useful ones. Once you get to know them all, you'll work both faster and more efficient. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** It enables me to work more efficient and smarter with both code and text ### 12. emacs, more like glee max! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tom J. | g-speak engineer, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** It's more hackable than any editor out there. You can live-code the thing, and the documentation is fantastic (and accessible from anywhere!). Also, I've got nyan cat in my status line instead of a scrollbar. How many editors can do that? **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Single-threadedness is annoying, packages can take a long time to update, "Emacs pinky". **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Don't be afraid to install packages! And watch the "Emacs Rocks!" videos: http://emacsrocks.com/ **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm using Emacs to write C++, Python, Ruby, GLSL, JavaScript and, of course, Emacs Lisp. Emacs's hackability makes it easy to integrate the editor directly with proprietary tooling we've developed in house. ### 13. one editor to rule them all **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 26, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** - Editor is well mature, its one of the longest running free and open source project (almost 40 years now) - Has been ported to almost every platform. - Its key binding, which is well designed and most of them have been adopted to different software. - Support almost everything language. - Its extensible, every and each part of the editor can be customize. - Extremely rich interface both Command-line and Graphical - Very active community/development - extensive manual/wiki, even stack-over flow has the separate section - well integration the developer tools ie. version control, virtual environment, build tools, debugger **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** - Vanilla emacs doesn't look promising, it take time to configure. - learning curve steep, it might be overwhelming for the beginners. - mouse integration is not great. - may not look shiny. - working with elisp **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Take you time, At last you will settle down in emacs or vi. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have used many editors during my programming carrier, it have never found the editor which does it just rite. It look may be deceiving but it has lots of power inside its hood, there is rarely any text editor with rival its states, ### 14. Essential all-purpose productivity tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 27, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Emacs is not only the most capable, multiplatform text editor available, it's also the host of many applications I use every day. It's my MUA (gnus), planner (org mode), calendar, and validator for a number of languages and structures file formats. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Emacs has a steep learning curve, but effort invested in learning it always pays off. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Start a local users group. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** - Linking of email messages to action items. - Distributed document authoring and editing via integration with git and pandoc. - Linked data publication. ### 15. Best editor on Linux **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 13, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Emacs is one of the various text editors that is default on most Linux distributions. This is beneficial in that I usually do not have to worry about installing it when I transfer between computers, or am just using another machine for a short period of time. Compared to VIM it is much more focused on writing rather than just editing. For minor changes VIM is fine, but for larger programming work Emacs is simple and provides all of the necessary tools I need. Additionally the more commands you memorize the more efficient you can become. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** The only disadvantages of using Emacs are the load times of large files, and the need to memorize many of the commands to make use of it. Other editors such as Less only read in files a page at a time, and can actively update while text is being piped to the file. Emacs does not have this ability. As mentioned above, the number of command to memorize can be fairly daunting in Emacs. Fortunately the ones you use most should come pretty easily. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Give it a try, it is worth it once you figure out the commands. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are trying to solve issues revolving around parallel compilation with production grade compilers. Emacs makes it easy to jump around between files and edit many at once. ### 16. The most flexible text editor I've used **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nicholas I. | Web Developer, Marketing and Advertising, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 25, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** The ability to fully customize the editor **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** The thing I dislike most is that it can sometimes feel a bit bloated. However, that is the trade-off for such amazing customization options. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** If you are using Vim, definitely give Emacs a shot. If you do not like the default binds, you are able to use Vim bindings via the Evil package, which provides a Vi Emulation layer. However, you should be familiar with the default binds like Ctrl-P, Ctrl-N, etc. in order to use some modes and packages. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** It allows everyone on the team who uses it to discuss something and fosters community ### 17. Productivity, but at a cost. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ewan D. | Head Of Software Development, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Emacs is the most versatile, extensible text editor I have used. There are many excellent, high-quality extension packages out there that allow the editor to be used for working with any information that has a textual representation - from source code files, to email, to notebooks/organizers, even web browsing. Plus, if you can't find a package that does what you want, you can extend the editor yourself using its built-in programming language. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** There is a steep learning curve to emacs. It takes a lot of effort to learn all the key-bindings and customization options that let you get the most out of this text editor. If you don't put in the time to learn it, there's really not much point in using it, as you'll most likely find it quite frustrating. The effort to learn it does pay off, though - my productivity has improved since I can do almost all of my work inside one environment that I know well. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** If you're looking for a lightweirght, customizible software development environment, and you don't mind putting in a bit of time to learn how to use it, emacs is for you. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use emacs mainly for my day-to-day work as a software developer. I can edit and compile source code in a variety of languages, and the version control integration means I rearely have to leave the editor. This enhances productivity greatly. Emacs is designed to be operated entirely by the keyboard, so once you have learned the shortcuts for the most common operations, you can work a lot quicker than by using a mouse. ### 18. Emacs Editor **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** I am not going to tell that Emacs give me freedom to configure my text editor since VIM, Sublime Text, Atom and etc are also good at that category, I reckon. I love some packages in Emacs, Magit, Tramp and Org-mode Magit is Git wrapper where I could handle git like GUI but in better way. Org-mode is Organizer mode where I could plan my daily life and work. By using Tramp I could access remote files over ssh without noticing I am doing that, which means I am handling remote files as local files **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** I think that learning curve is a bit deep comparing to other editor. To use emacs properly I had to learn lisp, at least how to read emacs-lisp code. I am missing some GUIs like proper tabs and separated file tree views which I could have other editors. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** I like to recommend and tried to my colleagues who are using VIM. I used to use VIM. But people have their own preferences. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am a ruby developer and I am using Emacs for my daily life. I used to use RubyMine which is commercial IDE from JetBrain. RubyMine is great but not free. Current company did not buy me a license for this IDE :(, seriously? So I had to decide to use Emacs. I have found that Emacs provides several good packages for Ruby development. Eventually I am using Tmux + Emacs in Terminal environment and this combination is better than RubyMine, I rekcon in case I have to handle multiple products at the same time. ### 19. Stockholm Syndrome **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sunil W. | Consultant, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 09, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** After learning the keybindings, using emacs becomes easy. Second nature. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** In order to do anything beyond light customisation, the user needs to learn lisp. Lisp is difficult to learn. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Consider other platforms as well. Consider all options very carefully. Vim is probably a better alternative: it is installed on more platforms and has a larger community. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use emacs for day-to-day work with web developement. With emacs, programming can be fast ### 20. One of the best editors **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 21, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** The unlimited ability of being customized. You can modify Emacs the way you like the most and it'll never let you down. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** The learning curve. Emacs is the most confusing application that I've used so far IMO. What's worse is that it never ends, you'll always find more to learn while using it. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** If you are switching from Vi, there are some vi-mode in Emacs to help you. If you're switching from other editors, try some control-started short cuts, it may also work since lots of applications actually adopted Emacs' key binding. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use it for general purpose editing and code editing. ### 21. No nonsense get things done editor. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nathan L. | Full Stack Javascript Developer, E-Learning, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** The wide variety of community packages and the minimal impact on system resources while it is running. Everything is customizable to an individual developer, but the major modes remain the same so that pair programming is easily accomplished. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** There isn't a lot to dislike. The software is actively maintained and any issues are easily addressed through community support. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Definitely give Spacemacs a try. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** Creating realtime user experiences using various technologies. All required packages are easily accessible, and easy file navigation with close git integration allows for rapid iteration while keeping working documents easily accessible to reduce mental overhead. ### 22. A programmable editor for any programming language **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** The simplest editor that supports customization in the most complex ways. Everything in Emacs can be changed; from the syntax coloring of your favorite language, to how frequently the cursor blinks. Some people say Vim has better default key bindings. Not only can those be changed, but there are actually several implementations of Vim within Emacs itself! Also, Emacs supports macros like no other editor (except maybe Vim). Automating routine tasks are a breeze in Emacs. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Emacs has a steep learning curve. It takes a while for new users to get accustomed to it. It may take a while to learn, but when you do perfect your Emacs strokes, there's literally no equivalent. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Take it out for a spin! It's a great tool to learn. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's great for editing text, writing and automating tasks. ### 23. Acquiring new LaTeX&Coding experience by using emacs **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yahao H. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** I could add new feature to this text editor by magic of elisp. let it work as you like is not an easy thing as it involve lots of things about lisp. Once you drag in and will find it's a way to make you progress. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Maybe the shortcoming of this software is that it allow users to do too many things, so the freshman will regard it as a hard thing to config it, and start. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Emacs is an really old software, but still work effectively. In community, many users contribute their configure file or lots of experience. We could easily find a solution in stackoverflow or other site. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** A emacs which has been well configured can help a lot in business such as coding. I often use it when write Python code. ### 24. Development Environment For All My Needs **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** My favorite part about Emacs is the ability to write Emacs Lisp to customize the editor however I want. The ability to do so is by-far the best part about it, albeit a bit frustrating at times, it can do wonderful things. Doing things in Emacs is so much faster than having to use a Terminal window and a point-click editor side-by-side. Running and creating commands can be really amazing for the most complex of things. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** To be honest, there isn't much that I dislike about Emacs, basically everything I've ever wanted in an editor is there or if not I can make it. The only thing that gets me is the learning-curve required to use emacs fluently. Since I come from a background of using mainly editors such as Sublime Text, Atom, or event notepad++; I've always used a point-and-click UI. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Get involved with the community and go ask some questions. There are a number of IRC or Slack groups that are specifically for Emacs. The community is friendly and the number of Elisp repositories you will find or code snippets is quite a few. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I've been learning Emacs over the past year or so and still haven't completely gotten fluent in it, though it will save a lot of time when my setup is how I want it, which might take a while. I've learned a lot about the innards of different systems such as Elixir and Erlang when writing custom elisp commands. Mainly, productivity is my main problem I'm trying to solve with Emacs. I've already seen some improvement in my productivity when I do use emacs, though, when I need to tweak something within the editor, it does take some time. It's most definitely worth it. ### 25. The best editor for developers **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael K. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Emacs is infinitely customizable and extensible. It's built on Lisp scripts, so if a feature you need is missing, you can write your own script or find one online. By utilizing free and open source packages, I've created an IDE solution that rivals WebStorm and other proprietary IDEs. Are you a Vim user? Emacs supports full Vim emulation. It's really easy to switch over. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** There is a large learning curve. An editor like Atom or Sublime Text is much easier to pick up and use with no experience. However, it is worth learning. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Give it a try, you'll be really surprised at the amount of features it offers. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** Everything I do in a text editor has become quicker since I switched to Emacs. ### 26. Excellent Tool, Steep Learning Curve **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nicole A. | Assistant Professor, Higher Education, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 12, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** When I was first introduced to emacs, I was told that it was "an excellent operating system, only lacking a good text editor". This facetious comment stresses the power that emacs has. Within emacs, I can view PDFs, compile LaTeX, open a shell and run python... and edit text. Emacs is suited to a variety of programming-like tasks; it responds differently whether I am in a *.cc file or a *.tex file. All of these aspects are controllable, in addition to the types of extensions that it associates with different keywords. It is possible to edit and add to this, which I have never done. I've used a few special extensions to Emacs, such as 'org-mode'. While nice, I found it wasn't the best tool for me. There is a way to have Emacs pull from file templates when you create a new file - this is very helpful for programming tasks, where you can have the basic structure (including constructor, destructor, etc names) populated automatically. Similarly, I have a special command that automatically opens the header file associated with the text my cursor is on (or it defaults to the header file for the class I am in) **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** I love the default key bindings, which are not the Windows ones. I dislike that when I am in other programs Ctrl-k does nothing for me. I am sure that it is possible to change all of the keybindings, but after using Emacs for over 10 years, I want to keep these! Due to how it looks and responds, the learning curve is very steep. I recommend this (and Linux) to my students, but I'm not surprised that they all don't jump on board. Many of them prefer to use a graphical environment for interacting with python and LaTeX. I hate graphical interfaces. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Spend the time setting up a good .emacs file - and take it with you! I work on emacs on 5+ computers, and I hate it when something isn't set up the same way. I can't do much on my own in LISP, but there are many examples out there to get you started on configuration. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** Programming: not just syntax awareness, but the use of templates and shortcuts for navigating files. LaTeX: Emacs doesn't spellcheck all of the special LaTeX commands and (based on a selected region) can do automatic indenting. I use this all of the time to find environments that I didn't close. ### 27. Best editor in the world for development **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Eduardo R. | CEO, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 06, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** It's extensible, open-source and integrates with real time development workflows such as CIDER. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** It has a steep learning curve and lots of moving parts. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Get used to key in commands. A nice tutorial is: http://www.jesshamrick.com/2012/09/10/absolute-beginners-guide-to-emacs/ If using a laptop keyboard, switch your control-cap locks keys: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MovingTheCtrlKey Get a nice integration to your development language. I use CIDER for Clojure. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** Developing fintech applications. ### 28. Daily code development, blogging, web design. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 18, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Extensible. It uses elisp to extend functionality. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Vim. It is literally just a text editor and that is it. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** User a starter kit like Prelude. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I can read my email, monitor my slack messages, commit my code, do code reviews. Using org mode I set to-do lists with measurable outcomes. ### 29. A vim user that using emacs. Ok, I am using spacemacs. **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Isaac Z. | Product Specialist, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Spacemacs extension Helm for search anything. Org-mode **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** single-threaded helm do not support helm embed. company mode do not support fuzzy match. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** multiple-thread supporting **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use emacs write software. And so, any business problem I solved with emacs. Emacs need multiple thread support ### 30. The powertool of powertools **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Emile S. | Developer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** I enjoy writing lisp code in general and having my config in elisp is great. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** At times things don't compose that well with a very customised setup. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** Writing software in an interactive manner. Emacs is great for this. ### 31. The best editor of all time **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Thanh Dũng T. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** - Emacs Keybindings - Highlight syntax - Autocompletion - Plugins - Spacemacs for long time Vim user. This is the main reason why I switch from Vim to Emacs **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** - Keybindings for editor motion - Hog CPU from time to time - GUI is not snappy and lag on occasions **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** I highly recommend to use Emacs in your workflow development **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** - It's so great for software development. - Absolutely improve my productivity ### 32. Python & Ruby Developer **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** 军朋 . | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Many plugins. I'd love such as magit, helm, projectile, snippet and engine-mode. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** The plugin manager is not good, will be better. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** It's cool. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** write some code. if you are developer, you should using Emacs. ### 33. Great text editor **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in E-Learning | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2016 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** It's completely customizable and has limitless features. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Learning curve can be steep. Sometimes you need things to work in a hurry without rummaging through tons of config files. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** Also checkout Spacemacs. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I'm mainly a Vim user, but I think that Emacs (with Evil) is a better editor, so I'm in the process of switching. ### 34. The old classic **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Hardware | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 31, 2015 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Simple at first glance, with immense power lying dormant, ready when you need it. Standard inclusion with Linux. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Absolutely daunting for beginners. However, practice makes perfect, and odds are someone in your company can help you with whatever comes up, since emacs is so widely used. **Recommendations to others considering GNU Emacs:** It's about as free as free gets, so by all means try it out through whichever means, you can even run it within windows if you so choose! **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** Used emacs occasionally at a previous company for various text editing needs within a Linux environment. If you're familiar with emacs, it greatly improves productivity to have access to its capabilities from any Linux terminal, as I did. (I've used emacs more frequently for personal use) ## GNU Emacs Discussions - [What is GNU Emacs used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-gnu-emacs-used-for) - [Is Emacs better than Vim?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-emacs-better-than-vim) - [Is Emacs worth learning?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-emacs-worth-learning) - [What's so great about Emacs?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-s-so-great-about-emacs) - [View GNU Emacs pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/gnu-emacs/reviews?page=2§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-14+22%3A22%3A01+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=5d91be9f-c8a0-454d-9581-a6b376dead69&secure%5Btoken%5D=bf40cf17b5c37440417ac2fcb76486e49f40d1b5dc160114bf6d959e9e2d69c4&format=llm_user) ## GNU Emacs Features **Coding** - Syntax highlighting - Autocompletion - Find and replace - Code folding **Editing** - Collaborative editing - Language Support - Selection Methods **Functionality** - Extensibility - Cross-platform support - Plugins and integrations - Security **Agentic AI - Landing Page Builders** - Cross-system Integration ## Top GNU Emacs Alternatives - [Visual Studio Code](https://www.g2.com/products/visual-studio-code/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (2,643 reviews) - [Notepad++](https://www.g2.com/products/notepad/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (2,412 reviews) - [Sublime Text](https://www.g2.com/products/sublime-text/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (1,749 reviews)