Not exactly an appearance, but I definitely give emacs a shout-out in the end notes of my new novel: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX</a>
That’s funny, I launched a startup novel three days ago [1] where I also referenced emacs in one of the scenes<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447484">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447484</a>
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?
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.
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 :)
Same on the not spotting emacs, I was too focused on the fact that the commands looked <i>right</i>. (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.
Something similar:
Nmap In The Movies
<a href="https://nmap.org/movies/" rel="nofollow">https://nmap.org/movies/</a>
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.<p>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.<p>Also recently watched Nirvana 1997 really good.
The T-800s HUD scene in the first Terminator used 6502 assembly from Nibble magazine.<p><a href="https://www.theterminatorfans.com/the-terminator-vision-hud-source-code-explained/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theterminatorfans.com/the-terminator-vision-hud-...</a>
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).
I always assumed Rodney was an emacs user. And Zelenka vim.
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.
One of the great onscreen code moments was in <i>Superman III</i>¹ 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.<p>⸻<p>1. A movie which exists primarily to set up a joke in <i>Office Space</i>.
<p><pre><code> 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</code></pre>
More great on screen code moments (I haven't got round to Superman III, yet): <a href="https://behind-the-screens.tv" rel="nofollow">https://behind-the-screens.tv</a> But Superman III is not just REM statements.
Like that time Kelly Rowland sent Nelly a text using excel <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1b8xawt/kelly_rowland_reacts_to_texting_nelly_via/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1b8xawt/kel...</a>
It was 100% not Excel: <a href="https://blog.jgc.org/2023/07/unfortunately-kelly-rowland-couldnt.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.jgc.org/2023/07/unfortunately-kelly-rowland-cou...</a><p>Also, we're really close to the 24 year anniversary of "Dilemma": <a href="https://hollawhenyougetthis.com" rel="nofollow">https://hollawhenyougetthis.com</a>
Which is pretty funny like was that a picture or actually running excel
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.<p>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.
> a lot of times it's a mix of random languages. Sometimes just jibberish.<p>And sometimes it's just a directory listing.
Mr Robot was generally pretty good for this kind of thing
Hilariously, the <i>Arctic Blast</i> screenshot seems to be the Audacity audio editor with Emacs overlaid! <a href="https://ianyepan.github.io/images/arctic-blast-emacs.png" rel="nofollow">https://ianyepan.github.io/images/arctic-blast-emacs.png</a>
Jamie Zawinski should be on the list. He hacked on XEmacs for ages.
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.
In Elif Batuman's 2017 novel <i>The Idiot</i>, 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.<p>I enjoyed the book. It got good reviews and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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”.
A nerd shibboleth, love it!
Enjoyable list but I’m not sure the AlphaGo documentary counts as pop culture :).<p>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.
> can’t remember ever meeting anyone who chose vi over vim<p>Pleased to meet you.<p>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.
> I don't know anything so compelling about it<p>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.<p>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.
> For me, it'd be primarily having more than one undo<p>Do you mean infinite undo? nvi has that. I'm not sure what you mean "set up as a tree" wrt undo, but i'll look into it. I think of nvi's undo as linear - I can 'u' to "undo" and implicitly set my "undo direction" "backward in time" (as one would expect). If I want to "undo, even more", '.' (dot, period) to "do that last command again" is what I'll do. If I want to "undo an undo", 'u'. That has the effect of moving the "undo direction" back towards the state of the buffer we had at the beginning of our discussion here.<p>...and, now I see your edit ;)<p>^[u..........:wq
> I'm not sure what you mean "set up as a tree" wrt undo<p>:h undo-branches<p>There's also a plugin to show a visualization of the tree, but the tree is implemented within vim.<p><a href="https://github.com/mbbill/undotree" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mbbill/undotree</a>
> can’t remember ever meeting anyone who chose vi over vim, let alone enough people to make th at the debate.<p>Because vim generally offers everything vi has.<p>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).<p>[1] <a href="https://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">https://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/</a>
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.
Anyone know of an equivalent list but for Vi/Vim?
Cryptonomicon has the use of a highly custom version of Emacs called OrdoEmacs.<p><a href="https://dev.to/hyenast2/neal-stephenson-s-cryptonomicon-and-ordoemacs-4g4c" rel="nofollow">https://dev.to/hyenast2/neal-stephenson-s-cryptonomicon-and-...</a>
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...
There's a perl script in the book that does some encryption/decryption. I remember typing it out and fixing it so it worked.
I have a cat named Emacs.
I've often felt that Emacs is more popular in Japan than I'd expect. Could just be blue car syndrome on my part.
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?
Someone please make a Vim version.
Yann LeCun is an Emacs user
"Jokes on you, Lenny. I use Emacs with Evil-mode – the best of both worlds!" <fistbump>
> 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!”<p>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.
I was hoping for Pantheon too (I’m 90% sure Holstrom uses EMacs instead of Vim?)
There is some trainspotting I can identify with!
Deldo - Vibration Control and Teledildonics Mode for Emacs<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sXuHnf_lo</a><p>Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast [Colorized]<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urcL86UpqZc</a><p>Writing an Emacs implementation in C (Gosling Emacs) | James Gosling and Lex Fridman<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA7aB-oxjVc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA7aB-oxjVc</a>
Time for an elisp port of Doom
That TRON theme linked in the article is cool, thanks for sharing.<p>At risk of being downvoted into oblivion by the emacs gang, I wonder if someone’s got a similar theme for vim?
JT Nimoy, responsible for the Tron scenes, had a nice write-up about their work on it as well:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120502000130/https://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20120502000130/https://jtnimoy.n...</a>
Bonus points for silicon valley doubling the Emacs references with vim AND spaces vs tabs
now someone do a "VIM appearances in pop culture" :)
Pfft. (neo)vim FTW ;)