Emacs appearances in pop culture

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.

Here you go, in no particular order:

2010 Movie, The Social Network

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

2010 Movie, Arctic Blast

Another 2010 film – this time, a sci-fi disaster movie jointly produced between Australia and Canada. At around the 20:30 timestamp, two scientists, Jack and Zoe, attempt to recover some satellite photos from a frozen hard drive. We see a scrolling wall of Emacs Lisp on their computer for a brief moment as Jack disappointedly said that most of the files are corrupted.

;;;###autoload, interactive, and save-excursion are all unmistakably Emacs Lisp syntax. The Elisp program shown on screen is in fact the xml-parse module source code, authored by John Wiegley back in 2001.

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.

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!”

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.

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.

In one chapter, an enemy hacker uses Emacs Lisp to exploit security cameras.

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!

1994-1996 OVA, Key the Metal Idol

Key the Metal Idol is a Japanese anime series from the 90s. It follows the story of a robotic girl Tokiko “Key” Mima and is a “somewhat dark drama with elements of mecha and sci-fi”.

In episode 9, Return, the mysterious character “D” is locked in a cell with just computer terminal. In a close-up scene, we see D hitting the return key and a scrolling wall of Emacs Lisp shows up on his terminal screen.

There is no mistaking for other Lisp variants, both save-excursion and set-buffer are Emacs Lisp specific keywords.

2013 Movie, The Internship

The Internship is a comedy film following the story of two 40-year-old salesmen spending the summer competing with other much younger and more technically skilled applicants for a job at Google. Despite its many inaccuracies in depicting real software engineer lifestyle at Google, it’s still an enjoyable lighthearted movie.

In a scene where character Nick Campbell (played by Owen Wilson) tries to impress a Google executive during her presentation, he raised the question, “Why not use Emacs rather than Vi as the default editor for Ubuntu?” To which the executive (played by Rose Byrne) replied, “That’s actually a very good thought, Nick.” Ironically, the scene is largely unrealistic because if those were real programmers sitting next to him, an all-out war would’ve started right then and there.

2014-2015 Anime series, Aldnoah.Zero

In Episode 5 of Japanese sci-fi anime Aldnoah.Zero, we catch glimpses of both Emacs and Emacs Lisp during a fight between two mechas. Blink and you’d miss it.

Look closely towards the bottom right, our pilot appears to be debugging some issues with their .emacs initialization file. We’ve all declared .emacs bankruptcy at one point so I can certainly relate to the pain. But in the middle of a mecha fight? Now that’s a first. Backing up the .emacs init file to start fresh.