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Emacs Appearances in Pop Culture

Ian Y.E. Pan Jun 8 2026-06-08T06:00:00+00:00
Jun 8 2026-06-08T09:39:52+00:00 5 min

As an Emacs user, few things are as delightful as catching my favorite text editor out in the wild. It doesn’t happen often though – Emacs is niche, and pop culture rarely gives it a nod. This post tracks down every one I know of (as of June 2026), and I’ll keep adding to it as I stumble across more!

2010 Movie, The Social Network

The Social Network is a biographical drama film portraying the founding of Facebook.

The Social Network The Social Network (2010)

In the scene where young Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) is putting together Facemash by scraping pictures from all the Harvard Houses (campus dorms), he fires up Emacs and writes a Perl script to crawl the website of Leverett House.

Emacs in The Social Network Movie scene where Zuckerberg is shown scripting Perl on Emacs in his Harvard dorm room

As the movie scene plays, Zuckerberg narrates, “… and there’s no way I’m gonna go through 500 pages to download pics one at a time. So it’s definitely necessary to break out Emacs and modify that Perl script.”

2010 Movie, Tron: Legacy

The other movie featuring Emacs coincidentally hit theaters the same year, 2010. Tron: Legacy is a well-received sci-fi film and the second installment of the Tron series. The Daft Punk soundtrack was awesome too, to say the least.

Tron Legacy Tron: Legacy (2010)

In one of the opening scenes, Edward Dillinger Jr. (played by Cillian Murphy) fires up Emacs’ eshell to grep and kill the system process that protagonist Sam Flynn initiated to attack ENCOM’s new OS 12.

Emacs eshell in Tron Legacy Emacs’ eshell used to grep and kill Flynn’s hacking program

P.S. Inspired by this movie scene, I created an Emacs color theme based on the color palette of Tron: Legacy. Check it out at https://github.com/ianyepan/tron-legacy-emacs-theme. My repo passed 200 GitHub stars not too long ago. I suppose I made quite a few people happy.

2014-2019 HBO, Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is one of my favorite shows (my all-time favorite is still Mr. Robot). It’s a comedy series parodying tech-industry culture, and it packs a surprising amount of insight into the software engineer lifestyle, the dynamics of VC funding, and the underdog startup’s fight against the big corporations.

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley (2014-2019)

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!”

Tabs vs Spaces fight Richard argues with Winnie over indentation style and choice of editor

Genius scene by HBO, sneaking in a brief reference to the editor war in the middle of a fight over indentation style. Not so genius for our poor Richard.

This scene is particularly important to me. It was, in fact, my very first exposure to both Vim and Emacs. I remember sitting in my university library that one evening ~10 years ago, taking a break from studying to watch this episode, and thinking to myself, “What are Vim and Emacs?” I looked them up, learned that all the 10x developers seemed to swear by one or the other, and decided I would pick up Vim first. After a year with Vim, I switched to Emacs with Evil-mode full-time – and here I am, writing this blog post in Emacs on a Sunday night. And first thing tomorrow at work? Probably fire up Emacs to review some pull requests : -)

1992-1993 DC Comics, The Hacker Files

The Hacker Files is a twelve-issue DC comics mini-series about a freelance hacker exposing a multinational conspiracy and taking down an evil corporation. It’s a pretty good read!

In the first issue, protagonist Jack Marshall uses Emacs to edit a source file to fight a computer virus. The comic doesn’t show the text editor’s user interface, just the command emacs cure.c.

The Hacker Files The Hacker Files (1992-1993), Issue #1

2013-2019 Manga series, Ōsama-tachi no Viking (The King’s Viking)

Ōsama-tachi no Viking is a Japanese manga series about a high school hacker teaming up with a wealthy angel investor to reshape the world order (Disclaimer: I have not read the manga yet. I am paraphrasing Wikipedia here.)

In one chapter, an enemy hacker uses Emacs Lisp to exploit security cameras (credits to: this Reddit comment).

The King's Viking Emacs Lisp sighting in Ōsama-tachi no Viking

The code may look like any generic Lisp variant (yes, the many parentheses give it away), but look closely – pcase and seq-map are Emacs-specific constructs, from pcase.el and seq.el – part of Emacs since 24.1 and 25.1 respectively.

Personally, I prefer mapcar or cl-map to seq-map in my own Emacs Lisp code for slightly better runtime performance, but I suppose a hacking script wouldn’t care about micro-optimizations in the heat of the moment – as long as it does the job!

Honorable mentions

A few honorable mentions that may not fall into pop-culture sightings, but are too good to leave out:

  • xkcd #378, Real Programmers – the famous strip where “real programmers use butterflies” to flip disk bits, capped by the line “‘Course, there’s an Emacs command to do that… good ol’ C-x M-c M-butterfly.” Emacs later added a real M-x butterfly command as an easter egg nodding to this very comic.

    XKCD Emacs The origin of M-x butterfly

  • Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning… Was the Command Line (1999) – the sci-fi novelist devotes a loving passage to Emacs, calling it “a thermonuclear word processor” and “outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars”.

  • And here is a list of famous Emacs users, curated by Xah Lee. Notably:

    • Donald Knuth (Turing Award winner; father of analysis of algorithms)
    • Guido van Rossum (creator of Python)
    • Yukihiro Matsumoto (creator of Ruby)
    • Simon Peyton Jones (creator of Haskell)
    • Jeff Dean (Google’s Chief Scientist, leading Google AI, Google DeepMind, and Google Research)
    • Jonathan Blow (game developer; creator of Jai programming language)
    • Julian Assange (founder of WikiLeaks)
    • Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux; technically uses micro-emacs, not GNU Emacs)
    • etc.

That’s it for today, hope you enjoyed the post as much as I did writing it!

References

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