Emacs appearances in pop culture

https://ianyepan.github.io/posts/emacs-in-pop-culture/

by ggcr • 1 month ago

408 118 1 month ago

ianyepan.github.io

ge964• 1 month ago

How to sell drugs online fast was a great show because they kept stressing how they had to have the test pass in their Vue front end.

I always whenever I see code on a show/movie I wonder if it's real, a lot of times it's a mix of random languages. Sometimes just jibberish.

Also recently watched Nirvana 1997 really good.

bigmattystyles• 1 month ago

Like that time Kelly Rowland sent Nelly a text using excel https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1b8xawt/kel...

ge964• 1 month ago

Which is pretty funny like was that a picture or actually running excel

jgrahamc2• 1 month ago

It was 100% not Excel: https://blog.jgc.org/2023/07/unfortunately-kelly-rowland-cou...

Also, we're really close to the 24 year anniversary of "Dilemma": https://hollawhenyougetthis.com

cgag• 1 month ago

I paused a bunch of times and I forget the details, but I remember everything always looking good, especially his brainstorming about the site and making notes about pgp and onion services and the like.

I also loved them knowing Lenny wrote some code, as he was the only person in the world who uses snake case in javascript, because I’m also a snake case heretic.

dhosek2• 1 month ago

One of the great onscreen code moments was in Superman III¹ where Richard Pryors’ character has written some “impossible” program and when the listing is shown on screen it’s pretty much five screens of BASIC REM statements.

⸻

1. A movie which exists primarily to set up a joke in Office Space.

jgrahamc2• 1 month ago

More great on screen code moments (I haven't got round to Superman III, yet): https://behind-the-screens.tv But Superman III is not just REM statements.

teddyh2• 1 month ago

  5 CLS
  10 PRINT "PLOT BILATERAL CO-ORDINATES"
  15 PRINT : PRINT
  20 GOSUB 5000
  25 PRINT "INPUT CO-ORDINATE X :  "
  31 PRINT "4";
  33 PRINT "2";
  35 PRINT "Y" : PRINT
  40 PRINT "INPUT CO-ORDINATE Y :  "
  41 IF INKEY$ = "" THEN 41 : IF
  42 PRINT "Z";
  43 IF INKEY$ = "" THEN 43 : IF
  44 PRINT "+";
  45 IF INKEY$ = "" THEN 45 : IF
  46 PRINT "X"
  47 GOSUB 5000
  50 CLS
  60 PRINT "0010 N = RND(900)"
  70 PRINT "0020 Z = 1 TO N"
  80 PRINT "0030 X = 1 TO 31"
  90 PRINT "0040 Y = 1 TO 15"
  100 PRINT "0050 SET(31-X,16-Y,Z)TO(31+X,Y,"
  110 PRINT "0060 SET(31+X,Y,Z)TO(31-X,16-Y,"
  120 PRINT "0070 SET(X,16+Y,Z-Y)TO(X,Y,Z)"
  130 PRINT "0080 SET(X,16-Y,Z+Y)TO(16+X,Y+)"
  140 PRINT "0090 GOTO 500"
  150 PRINT "0100 NEXT X:NEXT Y:NEXT Z
  160 PRINT "0110 CLS"
  170 PRINT "0120 DATA 1.13.2.67.2."
  180 PRINT "0130 DATA 12.45.90.3.23.56.2.56"
  190 PRINT "0140 DATA 3.6.1.43.92.56.2.9.08"
  200 PRINT "0150 DIM P(9)"
  210 PRINT "0160 B$ = CHR$(191)"
  220 PRINT "0170 FOR X = Y - Z : PRINT X"
  230 PRINT "0180 FOR Y = X - Z : PRINT Y"
  240 PRINT "0190 END"
  250 PRINT
  260 PRINT
  270 PRINT
  280 PRINT
  290 PRINT
  300 PRINT
  310 PRINT
  320 PRINT
  330 PRINT
  340 PRINT
  350 PRINT

thesuitonym• 1 month ago

a lot of times it's a mix of random languages. Sometimes just jibberish.

And sometimes it's just a directory listing.

noir_lord2• 1 month ago

Replicator code in Star Gate was iirc (it’s been a good while) the html/js for the royal bank of Canada (appropriate since it was mostly filmed in Canada).

ge964• 1 month ago

now that's cool, the OG star gate movie? I watched SG-1 multiple times and watched the other ones too, too bad about the reboot being cancelled.

whateveracct• 1 month ago

I always assumed Rodney was an emacs user. And Zelenka vim.

xoxxala• 1 month ago

The T-800s HUD scene in the first Terminator used 6502 assembly from Nibble magazine.

https://www.theterminatorfans.com/the-terminator-vision-hud-...

wisemang• 1 month ago

Mr Robot was generally pretty good for this kind of thing

bigfatkitten• 1 month ago

They placed a lot of importance in realism, and the show had top notch advisors.

https://onlinegrad.syracuse.edu/blog/mr-robot-cybersecurity-...

tdubey• 1 month ago

Hilariously, the Arctic Blast screenshot seems to be the Audacity audio editor with Emacs overlaid! https://ianyepan.github.io/images/arctic-blast-emacs.png

herodoturtle• 1 month ago

That TRON theme linked in the article is cool, thanks for sharing.

At risk of being downvoted into oblivion by the emacs gang, I wonder if someone’s got a similar theme for vim?

hsbauauvhabzb• 1 month ago

There’s aren’t that hard to make, rip the palette and vibecoding a theme is viable.

itrunsdoomguy• 1 month ago

Time for an elisp port of Doom

TeaVMFan3• 1 month ago

Not exactly an appearance, but I definitely give emacs a shout-out in the end notes of my new novel: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX

nickla• 1 month ago

Amazon! Are you selling an e-book? I couldn't access the site. I wouldn't buy from them anyway as I am sure they require DRM. I don't buy DRM.

TeaVMFan3• 1 month ago

I chose the DRM-free route on Amazon for "Means & Motive" ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX ) . Self-published authors can choose to be DRM-free on Amazon now. You can also buy it via Barnes & Noble (paperback), links here: https://frequal.com/novels/

mck-• 1 month ago

That’s funny, I launched a startup novel three days ago [1] where I also referenced emacs in one of the scenes

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447484

poolnoodle• 1 month ago

That sounds really interesting, would like to read it. Amazon is not an option for me though since they don't let you download your ebook files anymore. Any other way I can get a copy and pay you for it?

TeaVMFan3• 1 month ago

Sample chapter here, DRM-free: https://frequal.com/novels/

The Amazon file is also DRM-free, I picked that option when self-publishing: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX

zingar• 1 month ago

Enjoyable list but I’m not sure the AlphaGo documentary counts as pop culture :).

It’s interesting how people talk about vi vs emacs, can’t remember ever meeting anyone who chose vi over vim, let alone enough people to make th at the debate.

jolmg3• 1 month ago

can’t remember ever meeting anyone who chose vi over vim, let alone enough people to make th at the debate.

Because vim generally offers everything vi has.

vi does have one advantage though. It's a lot lighter. vim is like 5.4MiB in size with 82 shared library dependencies, while vi[1] is like 260KiB with 2 library dependencies (libc and ncurses).

[1] https://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/

floxy• 1 month ago

For resource constrained systems, don't overlook busybox vi.

https://k.japko.eu/busybox-vi-tutorial.html

bch3• 1 month ago

can’t remember ever meeting anyone who chose vi over vim

Pleased to meet you.

Most of my console dev time is spent in *BSD, where nvi is where I land. I find the the default creature-features of vim annoying, so I end up having to configure it to be a bit more quiet, and I don't know anything so compelling about it (a vi clone (to an extreme, acknowledged)) that nvi isn't a good enough place to be. I have vim installed, but it's not my go-to.

jolmg3• 1 month ago

I don't know anything so compelling about it

For me, it'd be primarily having more than one undo. Not being able to undo the second-to-last change is pretty bad. In fact, vim's undo being set up as a tree that can be walked with g- and g+ is excellent. It's impossible to lose a state of the buffer, even if you undo and make changes. It's a lot more practical to navigate than Emacs' undo, too.

EDIT: I just realized that nvi can undo more than one change by having u toggle the direction and . continue in that direction. I don't think ex-vi could. busybox vi seems like it can undo multiple with u but it seems to have no redo.

samtheprogram• 1 month ago

The only times I encounter vi (and so not sure what version, but likely barebones Linux), it doesn't indicate whether you are in insert or normal mode. So I immediately install vim (once possible).

Is that something you just get used to, or was I using some weird vi?

throw0101c• 1 month ago

can’t remember ever meeting anyone who chose vi over vim

As a sysadmin, I prefer a basic "vi" as in most cases I want quick open/edit/close and don't need fancy colours and such. (I.e., vim.tiny on Deb/Ub rather than vim.basic.)

guidoschmidt• 1 month ago

Bonus points for silicon valley doubling the Emacs references with vim AND spaces vs tabs

dleslie• 1 month ago

Cryptonomicon has the use of a highly custom version of Emacs called OrdoEmacs.

https://dev.to/hyenast2/neal-stephenson-s-cryptonomicon-and-...

justinhj• 1 month ago

There's a perl script in the book that does some encryption/decryption. I remember typing it out and fixing it so it worked.

wowczarek4• 1 month ago

Not only does Enoch run everything as root, he also has an account in my system, and in yours. But I guess he was there first...

DonHopkins3• 1 month ago

I have a cat named Emacs.

sukuva2• 1 month ago

Now you need a dog named Vim, a bird named Nano and a goth girlfriend named Kakoune

DonHopkins3• 1 month ago

Naming a dog after an inferior text editor would be cruel and demeaning! ;)

Perhaps VI would make a good snake name, though: VIper.

DonHopkins3• 1 month ago

Deldo - Vibration Control and Teledildonics Mode for Emacs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo

Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast [Colorized]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc

Writing an Emacs implementation in C (Gosling Emacs) | James Gosling and Lex Fridman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA7aB-oxjVc

worik• 1 month ago

There is some trainspotting I can identify with!

Grosvenor• 1 month ago

Fuuck. Did Spud use vim?

We know Sick Boy (Zero Cool) would be an emacs user.

laidoffamazon• 1 month ago

I was hoping for Pantheon too (I’m 90% sure Holstrom uses EMacs instead of Vim?)

nico• 1 month ago

Amazing show btw, highly recommend it

drob5184• 1 month ago

In a scene (Season 3, Episode 6) where protagonist Richard is coding with his new girlfriend Winnie at her apartment (okay, yeah… that’s not how all software engineers date, whatever the outside world may think), the two clash over the use of spaces versus tabs. Richard, a stubborn advocate of the tab character for indentation, argues: “I mean I do not get why anyone would use spaces over tabs. I mean, why not just use Vim over Emacs?” To which Winnie replies, “I do use Vim over Emacs.” Richard then breaks down, yelling, “Oh, God help us!”

Gotta admit that I use Emacs and favor spaces over tabs. And K&R braces. And you’re wrong if you make any other choice.

patrickmay• 1 month ago

Allman FTW!

(With you on spaces, though.)

rmunn6• 1 month ago

waves Vim and spaces over here as well. Emacs is a great tool, I just can't stand its keyboard shortcuts. In theory I should try out evil mode, but I've got NeoVim configured how I like it and I don't want to spend the time on switching.

As for tabs vs spaces, in theory, tabs are more flexible than spaces and allow everyone to view the file with their preferred indentation levels. In practice, I have only seen one codebase — ONE — in all my years of programming that was using tabs and yet did not end up with spaces getting mixed in with those tabs at some point along the way. (In the indentation, I mean: obviously once the non-indentation part of the line starts, you want spaces there). And that codebase had precisely two people committing regularly to it. Occasional PRs from other contributors, but only two primary maintainers.

Every other tab-using codebase I've seen (of non-trivial size and complexity, that is), someone, somewhere, had been lazy, or had a misconfigured editor, or something, and spaces snuck into the tabs. The worst offender I ever saw was a file that had been edited by multiple people over the years, who must have had different tab settings in their editors. There was one section where they had tried to line up a bunch of variable assignments and values. (Yes, I know, bad idea, but stick with me for a minute, I'm getting to the punchline). None of the pieces of code that were supposed to line up were actually lined up. (This was C# code, so indentation didn't truly matter like it would in F#, or Python, or ... well, I won't list all of them since I'm trying to get to the point). Here's the really hilarious part. I tried all sorts of tab settings to see if I could get that file to line up. I tried 8. I tried 4. I tried 2. I even tried 3, the setting for the people who can't make their minds up between 4 and 2. Then I tried really oddball settings like 16, 5, or even 7. Nothing worked. There was no tab-size setting I could use that would make the code line up. Which entirely negates the whole point of tabs, that you can set your own indentation.

That was the day I said "Forget about tabs, just use spaces, you won't have that problem with spaces." Tabs have great promise, but in practice, in my experience at least, you end up having to tell your colleagues "hey, you need to set your tabs to 4" (or 8, or 2, or ... well, you better not be using any other numbers) "before editing this file". Which basically negates the whole point of tabs. They're great in theory, but I've only seen ONE codebase that made them work in practice.

alt187• 1 month ago

Wow, I use Emacs and tabs over spaces. And K&R braces. Now we must fight to death.

drob5184• 1 month ago

That escalated quickly. ;-)

fergie2• 1 month ago

I was a diehard spaces-over-tabs person until I saw this scene in Silicon Valley. I had rather naively assumed that the tab-indent default in emacs was an oversight rather than a considered decision. This scene actually educated me.

messh• 1 month ago

now someone do a "VIM appearances in pop culture" :)

pugworthy• 1 month ago

See https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/comments/1u0vg28/vim_appeara...

This is from the person who wrote the original article on Emacs.

panza• 1 month ago

I've often felt that Emacs is more popular in Japan than I'd expect. Could just be blue car syndrome on my part.

mghackerlady2• 1 month ago

There's two reasons for this, I think. The most obvious is that emacs has better CJK support compared to any other editor of the time. The less obvious is that Japan liked lisp machines and lisp in general a lot

dasyatidprime4• 1 month ago

Notably, Yukihiro Matsumoto took substantial inspiration from Lisp while designing the Ruby language. You can see historical Lisp terminology in the Ruby interpreter sources (at least last I checked, which was a long time ago), like the use of “Q” to refer to a dynamically typed datum that can be stored in a cell.

(Hah, I just looked around a bit more, and Wikipedia cites an archived mailing list message that I don't remember seeing before: https://web.archive.org/web/20181027195101/http://blade.naga... I remember at some point Emacs Lisp specifically being cited as an inspiration, but I might be confabulating that, I didn't find a source for it.)

Also, here's a fun paragraph from the opening comments of quail.el (lightly reformatted):

[There was an input method for Mule 2.3 called ‘Tamago’ from the Japanese ‘TAkusan MAtasete GOmen-nasai’, or ‘Sorry for having you wait so long’; this couldn't be included in Emacs 20. ‘Tamago’ is Japanese for ‘egg’ (implicitly a hen's egg). Handa-san made a smaller and simpler system; the smaller quail egg is also eaten in Japan. Maybe others will be egged on to write more sorts of input methods.]

valisvalis2• 1 month ago

Someone please make a Vim version.

kridsdale1• 1 month ago

Sadly no film or tv depiction exists because they ran out of film and budget waiting for the actor to figure out how to exit.

valisvalis2• 1 month ago

good one lol

tnelsond4• 1 month ago

I think you mean Ed, the standard editor.

sscaryterry• 1 month ago

Pfft. (neo)vim FTW ;)

Barrin92• 1 month ago

JT Nimoy, responsible for the Tron scenes, had a nice write-up about their work on it as well:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120502000130/https://jtnimoy.n...

spillcoffee• 1 month ago

Do you lose all street cred if you use Emacs keyboard shortcuts whenever you can, but will use vim/nvim if there is no other choice?

tikhonj• 1 month ago

You always have a choice. Sometimes the best move is not to play.

eichin• 1 month ago

A long time ago I was doing some on-site programming at a swiss bank, and the only available editors were vi on a Sun, or EDIT on a VMS machine (the project involved both.) I learned rudimentary vi on the fly while waiting for ftp-by-mail-over-uucp to deliver GNU emacs sources :-)

aeonik• 1 month ago

You can just use evil mode inside emacs and get the best of both worlds.

Vim and Emacs barely overlap in functionality.

sukuva2• 1 month ago

I do the same, vim is just more accessible on headless servers.

wging• 1 month ago

I'd add rms/Richard Stallman to that list of famous emacs users. He's famous for way more than just gnu emacs, so it's not quite cheating.

ndc• 1 month ago

I also wondered why RMS is not in the list of famous people using Emacs. He's the frickin creator and also famous. Or is he a persona non grata now?

js8• 1 month ago

I found it kinda funny he's not on the list; he should be the first there, without him Emacs would probably be a footnote in SW history.

wowczarek4• 1 month ago

There's an obscure Polish film from 2002, "Haker" (Hacker), obscure for many reasons and not in a good way; it's absolute drivel, not even accidentally funny in a MST3K, B movie kind of way - it's just really, really bad.

In this gem there is a conversation about hacking into some system, and a character asks another a completely nonsensical semi jargon question, which goes like this: "Did you try Emacs via Sendmail?". I shit you not.

This expression firmly cemented itself into Polish tech speak as a way to refer to or call out someone having absolutely no idea what they are taking about.

JSR_FDED• 1 month ago

A nerd shibboleth, love it!

kstrauser2• 1 month ago

A common US equivalent comes from a Dilbert strip where the boss wants him to investigate databases, with the suggestion that “mauve has more RAM”.

userbinator• 1 month ago

That expression reminds me of another old meme in Russian: "How does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?"

seba_dos1• 1 month ago

Even Emacs through sendmail couldn't penetrate the double wall of fire.

globular-toast• 1 month ago

That's in TFA including a screenshot...

wowczarek4• 1 month ago

Wasn't there yet when I read it.

fergie2• 1 month ago

Bro- read the article before commenting!

wowczarek4• 1 month ago

I swear it wasn't there when I first read it! Must have been my firewall.

jonjacky• 1 month ago

In Elif Batuman's 2017 novel The Idiot, about a naive Harvard student, her not-really-a-boyfriend Ivan, a math student, enthuses to her about Emacs. The book is set in 1995.

I enjoyed the book. It got good reviews and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

beepbooptheory• 1 month ago

Yes, good book! If I remember correctly, he is just learning emacs and is confounded and a bit annoyed with it. Which sounds about right.

IlikeMadison• 1 month ago

Yann LeCun is an Emacs user

redbluething• 1 month ago

"Jokes on you, Lenny. I use Emacs with Evil-mode – the best of both worlds!" <fistbump>

saaspirant• 1 month ago

Something similar: Nmap In The Movies https://nmap.org/movies/

Topology1• 1 month ago

Anyone know of an equivalent list but for Vi/Vim?

yanhangyhy• 1 month ago

i have been using it from collage. 15 years+ now, i still love it for it's design, and i would expect to use for another 15 years.

jeandrek• 1 month ago

Nice. I've never seen any of these things except for Tron: Legacy; and I either didn't notice it was Emacs or immediately forgot if I did (you could also sorta take it to be tmux or something if you don't look closely enough to see the *eshell*). But this is the sort of thing I would generally never let my acquaintances hear the end of if I spotted :)

rmunn6• 1 month ago

Same on the not spotting emacs, I was too focused on the fact that the commands looked right. (A `ps` to find out which process it was, then a `kill -9` of the PID). It was nice to see realistic Unix commands rather than Hollywood Hacking, for once.

kstrauser2• 1 month ago

Jamie Zawinski should be on the list. He hacked on XEmacs for ages.

chr• 1 month ago

If so, balance good and evil by including marca of A16Z, once an Epoch maintainer.

internet_points• 1 month ago

The air traffic control one is my favorite :)

-----

And when searching for emacs air traffic control I stumbled on https://www.idsairnav.com/main-areas/aim/airport-em-environm... haha:

EMACS, Electromagnetic Control and Survey, is an AIM (aeronautical information management) tool that applies advanced simulation techniques to perform airport and Enroute electromagnetic environment analysis as well as airport and en-route electromagnetic site verification.

neonnoodle• 1 month ago

IIRC there’s another scene in Silicon Valley where they have a post-it board of feature ideas for their software and one of them is “emacs keybindings.”

mattdeboard• 1 month ago

I traded emacs for vscode several years ago now but this post made me wonder if I'd be insane for dusting off my herd of finely shorn yaks to try typescript dev again with it.

At the time I left for vscode, emacs had a REALLY bad Typescript story and it felt like a revelation doing TS in vscode.

Surely emacs has gotten a definitive TS solution since, idk, 2018? 2019? Right?

idahoduncan• 1 month ago

I guess so - I use built in TypeScript modes, and integrate with tsc via the built-in LSP client, eglot. Works well. Front-end specialists may disagree.

martinjee_op• 1 month ago

I’ll always think this is the greatest Emacs pop culture appearance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kcOfWSDEjg

Emacs appearances in pop culture

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