# 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, enabling tailored setups to fit their unique workflows. (1 reviews) - Users love the **extensive customization** options in GNU Emacs, enabling tailored workflows and enhanced productivity. (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find the **complexity overwhelming** , with a steep learning curve that requires significant time investment to master. (1 reviews) - Users find the **learning difficulty** to be high, requiring significant time to master GNU Emacs features. (1 reviews) ## GNU Emacs Reviews ### 1. Highly Configurable and Extensible Platform **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ganesh G. | Senior Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 09, 2026 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Everything is configurable and extensible **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Learning curve is very low and its take lot of time to figure out things. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** Editing code requires using dedicated IDE for which a pricely license is required. This open source software allows to code without paying ### 2. Power and flexibility **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 09, 2024 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Power. Flexibility. I love to able to do everything in the same software. **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Lack of interaction with other users. No availbility to install in work. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ease to write with. ### 3. A genuinely good open source text editor for Unix **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Harshit G. | Freelancer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 02, 2022 **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. **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. **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. **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. ### 4. Emacs: The holy grail for code editing? **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2022 **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. **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. **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. **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. ### 5. GNU emacs is wonderful OS , it just miss a good editor ... jk **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Phil C. | Community Volunteer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 07, 2015 **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. **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. debuging 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. **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. **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. ### 6. My favorite IDE -- or I'd say OS ;) **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Zhaorong M. | Programmer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 16, 2019 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Fully-configurable. You can configure anything - Theme, sytnax 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 operation system. Active and expert community. emacs community is supportive and experienced. emacs is older than me, so are many emacs developers. :) **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. **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. **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. ### 7. An Amazing Text Editor With Sub Shell **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ankit K. | Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 08, 2022 **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. **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. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using Emacs to fix the small code changes and run the code in the background. In addition, we are using Emacs to make a to-do list and to make quick notes for future reference. ### 8. powerful, extensible, not easy **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 01, 2022 **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 **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** not exactly easy to learn or discover. integration with modern development systems limited or DIY **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** mostly use it to reformat and clean up tabular data so it can be imported cleanly elsewhere. macros plus rectangular selections hard to reproduce elsewhere ### 9. From the 80s - still my primary editor **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brian L. | Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 17, 2021 **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 **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** There is a learning curve of the better part of a day **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. ### 10. Extreme Powertool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 16, 2022 **What do you like best about GNU Emacs?** Everything can be done with the keyboard, without once using the mouse. An extensive amount of shortcuts are available **What do you dislike about GNU Emacs?** Learning emacs is a steep learning curve. It requires lots of time to get into the workflow with emacs and memorizing the shortcuts. **What problems is GNU Emacs solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use emacs in the org-mode to take notes, write my todo lists and manage agenda files. ## 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/gnu-emacs-review-4950186?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-13+06%3A37%3A18+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=ac72ed0a-0c0e-4750-b43c-6a2c434b58aa&secure%5Btoken%5D=db08359ec60604b64a583f2daf011169fabfad14670de8cef025233aa779c49a&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 (2,548 reviews) - [Notepad++](https://www.g2.com/products/notepad/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (2,397 reviews) - [Sublime Text](https://www.g2.com/products/sublime-text/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (1,746 reviews)