A tragic story of Emacs lover.

I have been trying to live with Emacs, Lisp, and org-mode for the past few years. I was successful to some extent. But now, the problem is that my fellow colleagues are heavily dependent on Microsoft products. I hope, if I get work in my interested areas, I will enjoy my life forever.

This is always a problem. If you are a linux user, you find most people are different from you.

Your colleagues have a right to make their own software choices, as bad as they might be. I've worked on projects that took a more traditional waterfall approach and had to write up various design documents. I did all my writing on Emacs, then once I was happy with the text, I'd copy paste everything into Word and manually format it. Interestingly, that turned out to also be the most efficient way to use Word. The Word users would tell each other to write a first draft without too much formatting and then formatting everything once, because of how... weird that product can get with its formatting. We were ultimately doing the same thing, just I did the initial typing and editing in Emacs. Everybody ended up happy with their design documents to never be read again. I don't mind customers asking for Word documents. If they want Word documents, and they're paying for my time to format the documents, the machine to run Windows with, and so on, then I'm happy to provide. It would only get tragic if they insisted for me to do my whole writing inside of Word, instead of allowing me to format at the end. No justification for that other than mindless micromanaging, so, not as happy with that. ​ >I hope, if I get work in my interested areas, I will enjoy my life forever. That's a very high bar for any employment to match...

I've been using Emacs for 20-25 years, and when I was working professionally with teams who had a relatively standardized set of tools and processes, I would generally follow those. I found that being "that guy" who always has an instinct to do things differently can lead to unnecessary friction and reduced productivity. Use Emacs at work if it's compatible with your work culture, but I don't advise trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Not sure I see the issue. I use emacs in such an environment, running in windows. So what problems are you having really?

At my last job, I wrote some (macOS-specific) code so that I could copy Markdown from Emacs and paste it as formatted text into other applications. It ended up pretty janky—different applications handled formatted text in the clipboard differently, it turns out—but worked well enough to save at least some manual formatting effort...

> But now, the problem is that my fellow colleagues are heavily dependent on Microsoft products. Rather than be depressed by the generality of it, it would help to list the specific problems you encounter. For example, I can make links to Outlook messages in Org Mode.

Damn you and your sensible advice :)

Emacs had excellent lsp support, and solid integration with the MS verse. Having said that it’s always easy to stumble into things that just won’t work without effort

To be honest, in enterprise environments, I've found that for productivity (and not necessarily freedom) I prefer WSL2+tmux+emacs over a similar setup on macOS or Linux. Like it or not, Windows is a pretty good enterprise setup when it comes to things like SSO, Outlook integration, etc.

It's not always all or nothing, you can still keep your notes in org-mode. I like to write larger articles in org-mode, export it to md to insert it into notion for example... I also like to prefilter my emails in notmuch and so on...

What do you mean by prefilter in this context?

I receive a lot of emails (100-200 / day), a lot of automated ones, tickets, github mails etc. With a Text-based client I can very quickly filter, define complex actions at a key stroke etc. left are sorted emails in folders, some linked into org-mode documents and so on. I answer though via google mail (for work) and read the html complex ones

I actually became the only person at my workplace to work in WSL2 using Emacs when everyone else was using Visual Studio 2015/2017/2019. Now everyone else is migrating to VS Code & Linux.

To a point, but there’s something to be said for having a robust, heterogenous working setup. On rare occasion it comes up that the problem a coworker is having is due to a bug in VS Code or whatever. It’s nice to be able to demonstrate that a different environment does (or doesn’t!) have the same issue. My company’s working on developing the idea of a “golden road”, a standard workflow that we officially support. You don’t _have_ to use that workflow, but if you don’t, it’s on you to smooth out any issues that come up. I think that’s a good pattern.

I have the same problem since far longer, not because of Emacs but because of Unix before, GNU/Linux thereafter as my desktop OS, Emacs was and is just an addition. I can say that: - I regularly do more with less effort and my presentations (in org-mode/EXWM have an incomparable/unrivaled WOW effect, so peoples, at least those in tech instead of complain that I'm "not standard" act like they face a stereotypical guru with me, even if it's not the case; - with a bit of effort so far I was able to keep up my ship well enough, oh, sure, with discussions, annoyances etc but with still a very positive outcome, my results speak for me and it's hard to state the contrary. So if you are prepared for regular discussions it's not that tragic, at least if you works in IT. Outside well... Some people do not feel the wow effect having issues understating tech in general, so they think you are just some alien who think it's way is better then the way most follow. For them I generally cut a bit brutally stating "yes, you are right, I think, because I know, my way is better and YOU do know a thing: very few drive a Pagani, most do not even know they are cars, did you think those are looser or winner? Did you know that in essentially ALL cases where are the most people is ignorance, poverty, darkness etc?". This might sound rude, but prove to be effective, people not in tech, not with much culture feel the emotions not much the logic, so a simple logic that works affirmed with brutal confidence and sense of superiority while totally debatable as a way of interact with others seems to be very effective, more than anything else...

What text mode email client do you use? My favorite is Alpine. I've used Rmail, Gnus, and VM many years ago, but I never got along well with any of them. And how does org-mode relate to your email client? I don't know much about org-mode but being able to link it to email sounds pretty interesting.

Generally, I haven't had much trouble getting Emacs to play nicely with work stuff... but Microsoft tends to be an exception in my experience. If you're expected to use VS, it's less painful to just rip off the bandaid immediately than to drag it out for a week.

I use [notmuch](https://notmuchmail.org/), it is more of a email backend storage with several frontends, one of which is [emacs notmuch](https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-emacs/). With org-notmuch (in org contrib) can create links to emails in org-mode `[[notmuch:msg-id][in this email]]` I think Gnus can do this as well. I still think reading emails on a text based interface are a problem in todays world as many are formatted for readablility (people highlight etc), which makes total sense, or adding pictures/screenshots and so on. I wish someone would do something like brownsh, but more performant.

Any chance you could throw in some details or a relevant link on how to accomplish that? And does the link survive folder moves within Outlook? Been thinking recently about trying to do just that.

I still use Emacs at work, but where it has its place: note taking, development outside of the main tools/applications used by the other teams. Just because it's not my day-to-day IDE at work doesn't mean it has no place for me.

I took a job in government because I have a young family to take care of. It starts in the new year. I am not even certain that I will be permitted to use Emacs on my required, government supplied Windows machine. I feel your pain

So did you have a question or something?

I have done so as well, but always with emacs running on the side, to use org-mode and occasionally open a file to run some macros.

Not necessarily. In another post, I told people that I lost interest in game dev after making it my job, and it's not me alone. So maybe you can just start to work in your interested areas in your spare time, and you'll get to enjoy your life.

I work on a large software product (one of the largest ones that existed if you asked) that's developed for Windows and I'm using Emacs without much trouble so don't be depressed and try to integrate it as much as you can into your workflow.

I notice some friction on teams these days as the standard or expected way of working shifts from solo work with periodic integration points toward seamless collaborative work, such as "mob" or "ensemble" programming. Individuals who want to work on a particular custom setup for their local development environment don't like having to adapt to the tool stack the rest of the team uses. Generally, collaboration yields better results, so I think it is a positive change for the industry. As with any change, there will be those who find it difficult or uncomfortable (initially, anyway). It may be possible to point out advantages of emacs opportunistically as issues arise, and gently guide the team your way. Actually, the mob/ensemble format makes this easier than it would be with the old (solo) way of working.

Notmuch sounds great. I've been using Mutt but now I'm trying notmuch. Just installed it while reading this. Thanks!

There is notmuch-mutt, which means you can use the mutt frontend with notmuch as backend... ;-)

Nice! Thanks.