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GNU's text‐editor Emacs (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/) is completely free software and offers a powerful solution to working with statistical software. Emacs (or EMACS) is an extensible and customizable text editor that could be used to complete the majority of all computer‐based tasks. Once a user learns the keyboard‐centric user interface through muscle memory, editing text for reports or coding becomes rapid and outpaces point‐and‐click style approaches. Emacs works on all major operating systems and gives near‐seamless interaction on Linux‐based computing clusters. The extensibility ensures that while the latest tools develop and change, your interface will remain constant. This quality will provide confidence to adopt new tools and adapt to new trends in software.

Using Emacs for specifically statistical computing, we note the excellent add‐on package called Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS) that offers a unified user interface for R, S‐Plus, SAS, Stata, and OpenBUGS/JAGS, among other popular statistical packages. An easy‐to‐use package manager provides quick ESS installation. Once installed, a basic workflow would be to open an associated file type (.R,.Rmarkdown, etc.) to trigger ESS mode. In ESS mode, code is highlighted, tab completion enabled for rapid code generation and editing, and help documentation integrated. Code can be interactively evaluated in separate processes (e.g., a single or even multiple R sessions), or code can be run noninteractively through Emacs‐displayed shell processes. Statistical visualizations are displayed in separate windows for easy plot development. As mentioned above, one can work seamlessly on remote servers (using TRAMP mode). This greatly reduces the inefficiencies inherent to switching between local and remote machines.

We also mention another popular extensible text editor Vim (https://www.vim.org/). Vim offers many of the same benefits as Emacs. There is a constant debate over the superiority of either Vim or Emacs. We avoid this discussion here and simply admit that the first author is an Emacs user, leading to the discussion above. This is not a vote of confidence toward Emacs over Vim but simply a reflection of familiarity.