<story><title>Emacs Symbolic Integration</title><url>https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/calc/Integration.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>submeta</author><text>Emacs has got to be one of the most misunderstood pieces of technology. It&amp;#x27;s often made fun of [1], just because of this misunderstanding. Saying Emacs is an editor (mostly), is like saying a smartphone is a phone (mostly).&lt;p&gt;Emacs is actually an appliction framework (and a Lisp machine) with a unified interface where one application can share data with other applications via &amp;quot;buffers&amp;quot; very easily because the basic data is text (no proprietary or fancy datastructures that can get outdated at some time). With this underlying structure (plus with the integrated programming language Lisp) you can connect, combine, configure (to your liking) every application within Emacs easily. In non-Emacs world, using isolated apps (islands), I&amp;#x27;d &amp;quot;beg&amp;quot; the dev teams to add this or that feature to make it more productive [3]. Not so in Emacs-land, where I can change every aspect of an app within minutes.&lt;p&gt;I have legacy tools &amp;#x2F; apps that were discontinued, and my data is stuck in those formats [2], and I don&amp;#x27;t have the time to migrate those documents.&lt;p&gt;Emacs is here to stay. And offers many apps (packages) for many use-cases: org-mode for project management, task-management, taking notes, writing complex documents, creating technical documentation with inline images, ascii tables, with embedded code (that can get run via org-babel); lsp-mode which transforms Emacs into a decent IDE; calc for doing basic to complex calculations within Emacs (documents); org-babel for doing literate programming; eshell for using your shell within emacs; mu4e which is a very good email client (says someone who used to use MailMate and was thrilled I could use keyboard shortcuts to control lots of aspects of my email client), and many more.&lt;p&gt;Emacs is the tool that will grow on you, and it will get better the more you learn about how to configure it.&lt;p&gt;---&lt;p&gt;[1]: &amp;quot;a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;[2]: EccoPro PIM from the 90s, AskSam (full text database) from the 90s, NoteMap (outliner), MS Access databases (from the 90s&amp;#x2F;2000s) with old format, and many many more.&lt;p&gt;[3]: Whenever I liked an app, I&amp;#x27;d quickly start writing with dev teams back and forth in forums or via email. Bear.app, Ulysses.app, iA Writer, DevonThink, etc. Constantly writing to the dev teams, asking to include this or that feature.</text></comment>
<story><title>Emacs Symbolic Integration</title><url>https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/calc/Integration.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sachdevap</author><text>One amazing use of symbolic integration: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;johnbcoughlin&amp;#x2F;calctex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;johnbcoughlin&amp;#x2F;calctex&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Create latex equations in calc! :D</text></comment>