I've had Emacs open in my screen while I'm working for twenty mutter mutter years, and my keybindings have diverged enough where I can't use stock Emacs without

I've had Emacs open in my screen while I'm working for twenty mutter mutter years, and my keybindings have diverged enough where I can't use stock Emacs without stopping and carefully thinking about what I'm doing. But that's sunk cost. I discourage young programmers from diving into it, for a couple of reasons. First, early in their career there are places where they will get a lot more leverage. Spend some time learning your text editor, sure, but at the five to ten hour mark that rabbit hole starts yielding swiftly diminishing returns. And second, everyone talks about shaping it to your workflow, but, in the end, Emacs is a terrible environment for writing UIs. Not everything is best interacted with as text in a terminal. In fact, most data is not. Compare org-mode with the best of breed todo apps like OmniFocus and Tasks. I use org-mode for my technical diary, and I use OmniFocus for my tasks. OmniFocus is simply better. GUIs with a mouse are a more efficient way to navigate most tasks on a computer that aren't programming. Stallman mentioned preparing text for publishing. I'm probably unusual in that I have both typeset professionally (back in Quark XPress days) and gone really deep in to LaTeX (in my physics days). I've written and typeset two books. The technical text I did in LaTeX. Actually, I wrote the text in a mix of Scrivener and LyX, and then used Emacs for the final document. For what lies nicely in LaTeX, that's great. The other one I did in Adobe InDesign, and doing it in LaTeX in a text editor instead sounds like masochism. If you're willing to accept what LaTeX gives you, it's fabulous. If not, typesetting with Emacs and LaTeX is a simply inferior experience to using a proper typesetting program.