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Locked in despite the freedom: why Emacs & co. have become proprietary

davids-world.com — Some free software is actually proprietary. Emacs is a good example. Once you're used to its proprietary key commands, terminology and fantastic productivity, it's way too complicated to switch away. Consequence: free software should be about the design, not just the license.

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  • DavidDennis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This is accurate - I have been using emacs for decades and the lock-in created by the control keystrokes is why.

    It's interesting that Cocoa emulates quite a few of them and so for editing a simple comment like this one, I can use the control characters I'm used to and be happy.

    I have started using TextMate for Ruby on Rails code because it makes the tangle of subdirectories Rails employs a lot easier to deal with, and because it has some really great text highlighting and quote matching features that help a lot. So the lock-in isn't total, it's just very close to it.

    I still use emacs for anything that doesn't involve Rails. Rails files tend to be small and so the search differences haven't affected me nearly as much as I thought they would.

    D

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