> Now, I just don't get it. What are emacs users customizing so intensely that no other environment can match it? I thing it's a bit between exploring the poss

> Now, I just don't get it. What are emacs users customizing so intensely that no other environment can match it? I thing it's a bit between exploring the possibilities of your tools, expressing yourself in some "divine art" and procrastinating under the guise of being productive. There is definitly a high amount of good customizing possible with emacs, but from my observation many end also in the trap of over-custimizing, to the point where it becomes harmful. Not to forgotten all the worthless oversmart solutions build in emacs, beacuse emacs gives them the means to do it. > The level of customization that emacs supports seems unnecessary to me. Emacs is a platform for textual and programatic interfaces. Similar to web-technologie. As such you can tweak little things, but also build whole apps dedicated to specific usecases with it. > Can you talk about a few use cases where emacs is just better than an IDE could be? It's not better than IDE, but similar level as IDE. Just that you are able to do it yourself. With an IDE, if you have a specific demand like integrating some new tool, or handling some specific filetype, you depend on the producer to build it into the IDE. Just recently IDEs have also learned to use plugins, to allow you build some stuff yourself. Ok, recently was 15-20 years ago, but emacs is 40 years old, predating them all.