At some point I might write up a longer post about this. For now – here’s what I have to share about Emacs.
You can change every part of it! If you don’t like how something works and you’re willing to do a little research, you can change it. You can do this while Emacs is running, meaning you can test out your alterations in real time. It’s awesome.
There are about a million packages you can install to do all sorts of cool things. For instance, I can’t stand the default keybindings. I use evil-mode, which lets me use vi/vim bindings, which feels much more comfortable to me (I used Vim for years before diving into Emacs.
Related to the last point: You can do anything in Emacs. Email, messaging, blog posting, prose writing, ssh, XMPP, irc, web browsing, and of course text editing and programming. I do all my Tidalcycles coding in Emacs, and Emacs’ flexibility makes it easy to create a sort of Tidal IDE and tweak it to your heart’s content.
Part of the joy of using Emacs is the joy of customization. I enjoy tweaking things as something fun in itself, not just to improve my Emacs experience.
Org-Mode and Org-Roam. Everybody talks about Org-Mode and how good it is, and they are write. In many ways, it’s just another markup language (like Markdown) but it can do much fancier things. Things like easily create tables, insert images, foldable outlines, export in many different formats, etc. etc. etc.
Using it becomes second nature, and I feel like my hands are tied if I can’t use Emacs for something. (Well, as long as I can use Vim I’m fine, as long as I’m just editing text)
The learning curve is steep but it’s worth it. Again, becoming proficient at Emacs is an achievement in itself.