GoKawiilAs 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.
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.
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.
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