There's specific stuff in the article about this. Emacs is much more discoverable than your average IDE. It is much easier to write plugins. You don't have to b

There's specific stuff in the article about this. Emacs is much more discoverable than your average IDE. It is much easier to write plugins. You don't have to bow to the gods to get a working, documented interface (see the Stevey post just before when he tries to implement focus-follows-mouse in an OS X accessibility API which is basically undocumented and, fatally, doesn't work as advertised in its comments). Here's another way to think about it: cobbling together myriad programs at the terminal and getting them to talk is an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of GNU Emacs. Like it or not, you're going to work in some kind of environment, so it might as well give you awesoma powah in every window you open.