How will the future affect Emacs? How will it affect the keyboard itself? Will we speak commands to be interpreted by language models? Will we direct a swarm of bots to do our bidding like an over-zealous Howard Hughes with a megaphone? Or, are keyboards and M-x here to stay?I’ve been thinking back a lot recently on a few of my favorite episodes of Tales From the Darkside, a horror anthology series that ran from 1983 to 1988, a recurring favorite on the Sci-fi channel, later collected on DVD, and probably streaming somewhere today. Two episodes from the first season are particularly memorable for me: “Mookie and Pookie” and “Word Processor of the Gods.” If you’re an Emacs user and haven’t seen these two great episodes of television, you have some homework to do. Google up, or do whatever it is you do when you need to search for something these days, and find these. At the very least, you will recognize the source of the background image I’ve used in countless YouTube video thumbails.In “Mookie and Pookie” (original air date 11 November 1984) a terminally (pun not lost on anyone) ill young man uploads his consciousness into a computer, leaving behind a special set of printed instructions for his sister, Pookie (Justine Bateman), on how to invoke his spirit in “the network” after he is gone.Hold that thought in memory for just a moment.In “Word Processor of the Gods,” (original air date 25 November 1984) based on a short story by Stephen King, a man receives a homebrew computer as a birthday gift from his recently deceased nephew. This special computer gives the user the ability to create, edit, and delete aspects of his own life—basically the power to author reality.Create, read, update, and delete your own life in “Word Processor of the Gods.”Is any of this reminding you of Emacs yet?These tales represent the hope and anxiety that people had about computers in the 1980s. Those magical boxes were either angels bringing benefits to mankind or devils that would lead to our doom. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that computers brought a mixed bag of benefits and drawbacks, but no one wants to go back to a time before we had them.I feel quite privileged that I got to see the birth of the first person shooter, the Internet, the smartphone, and “AI” (jury still being out on whether or not language models are really “artificial intelligence”), and have lived long enough to tell about it.But we are drifting here from the thrust of this article, which is basically to pontificate on the question of “How will the future affect Emacs?”Let’s go back to “Mookie and Pookie” and the image of teenage Justine Bateman typing out programs by hand, on a keyboard, in that episode of Tales From the Darkside. At the start of the episode, the girl who hates computers is nervously typing one command after another, trying to get a feel for this mysterious box. But soon, she’s become a hacker, accessing data banks and interfacing with the soul of her dead brother. We can see she’s not just typing commands but learning magic.Justine Bateman typing out programs in “Mookie and Pookie.”Nothing so closely matches the experience I had learning Emacs. Except, of course, that I was a thirty-year-old man, not a teenage girl.Nevertheless, “Mookie,” like “Word Processor of The Gods,” is about using the keyboard as a conveyance for invoking magic.Fast forward to my discovery of Emacs. Using the help system was like opening a book of magic spells. The keyboard was my wand, artist’s brush, sculptor’s trowel, chef’s saute pan, or whatever artistic/magical metaphor you prefer. This magic is achieved by invoking M-x.Invoking M-x is the most sensuous and gratifying experience in all of computing.That simple key command opens a whole world of possibilities.There’s nothing quite like it. Even though I can set a custom key-binding for a frequently used function, I often still prefer not, because M-x is my silver key.But this is how we use Emacs today. Now, let’s get to the brave new world.Computing is about choice, especially in our open source communities. That will never change. I don’t know how future developments will affect Emacs, no one does. But I don’t see how it could change much for those who choose to use it over newer and flashier options.It’s easy to see how a coding agent could nullify a text editor for a segment of users, but that would be applicable to all text editors—not just Emacs.As any Emacs user can attest, it’s more than a text editor. Learning the ways of Emacs is learning the ways of Lisp which is learning about the nature of computation itself. That journey is worth taking for its own sake. No “agentic” expedient can replace it.People are still learning and speaking “dead” languages like Latin and Ancient Greek. Because they’re not dead at all. They’re just as vibrant as ever in the places they are spoken (mostly in churches and legal offices) and in the languages that have been built from them.While I do my best to welcome and understand any new technology, and reserve the right to tinker and test and taste to my heart’s content, I have no immediate plans on giving up my precious M-x. Not for nothing.The post M-x and the future of Emacs appeared first on Chris Maiorana.