It's unfortunate its underlying ideas aren't more widely used in our industry, the very idea that you don't need to expose a separate API for people to create and extends things since code is the api is a idea that put emacs on a league of its own .... Thank you to anyone who has been involved in developing it.

Also I would love to hear Stallman view of labs using (A)GPL code and not contributing back to the world since this is completly against not only the ethos of free software but what Stallman teached to the world about the very purpose of its license

Curious what are the biggest things that have come out in the last year or two, and what emacs based personal software have others reading this made?

There were better and worse times in Emacs history. Recent times, however, are really good. Emacs is maintained and developed actively and there are many external packages which are impressive. Magit and ghostel are good examples of packages that I use on a daily basis to get my work done.

Recently, AI completely changed how I use Emacs, and in a very good way. I now treat AI as a fairy that can fulfill any wish. I describe how I want my editor to work, and boom! it works that way.

Examples: window and tab management, difftastic integration, markdown previews with beautifully rendered tables, markdown previews as PDFs, and many more.

What is most important, however, goes back to Stallman's original ideas. I am in control of my editor and my environment. I decide how it will look and behave. No corporation decides for me. No corporation builds in a new AI assistant. Nobody introduces ads or tracking. This is something I've learned to appreciate over the years.

Emacs is still my main editor over ssh, so I happen to use it on a regular basis, and the commands are all imprinted on my fingers' muscle memory, so that's quite the comfort zone.

Happy Emacs anniversary to everyone!

I no longer use Helm (I'm doing Vertico/Orderless/Consult), but I've stuck with Org-mode since then. I sometimes venture out to other apps (like Joplin, Obsidian, Apple Notes, Apple Reminders, etc), but Org-mode just works best for me.

I don't even use it's most advanced features. The most complicated thing I do is maybe recurring schedules and using the agenda. I don't even have agenda view defined (although I really should at this point, it would be really helpful).

I use it every day at work with a daily log.org file keeping track of what I did each day, a habits.org file for recurring tasks I want to make sure I do (check my email, find a PR to review, etc).

I have various files to help organize my personal life - I heavily rely on Beorg [2] for that.

Looking back on my years with Org-mode, I feel like the primary reason I use it is for the ease of use with keybindings and dealing with plain text. I don't need to dig through menus or swipe around. I just go in and type, write, and delete.

[0]: https://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html

[1]: https://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

[2]: https://www.beorgapp.com/

I'm not a coder, but I did use Emacs daily around 2010-2012, with brief returns later. I always gave up eventually because the complexity of addons, the org-mode-can-do-everything-so-I-should-do-everything-with-it etc just grew over my head. I've discovered that I like Plan9 Sam, Acme and, in general, the one-thing-well camp better. Each their own, I guess.

That said, I did often like how "immersive" using Emacs can actually be at times. I'm a trained journalist, and it made managing bits of information, including PDFs etc, really streamlined, almost like a wonder. And, I had my own little OS on a USB stick that way (though the minimalist in me always whined that "an editor" should not weigh 100+ megabytes).

Incredible that it has been around for 50 years, with no signs whatsoever of being a "paradigm of the past".

Modern editors build layers upon layers of IPC, JSON-RPC protocols, and sandboxed extensions to keep the user from touching the core. Emacs did the opposite: it gave the user direct access to the live execution state. You don’t "configure" Emacs from the outside; you mold it into the exact operational extension of your own thought process.

In an era where modern developer tools consume gigabytes of memory just to render a UI tree, there is something deeply grounding about a piece of software from 1976 that still offers the most malleable computing medium on earth.