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For me, I've been using Emacs for 20 years. It comes down to two things: 1. I never have to move my hands from home row. Pretty much anything I need to do, I

For me, I've been using Emacs for 20 years. It comes down to two things: 1. I never have to move my hands from home row. Pretty much anything I need to do, I can do in Emacs (including file browsing, PDF viewing, web browsing, music playing, git, shell stuff, etc), and faster, because I can rebind keys at will. Emacs is just too darn flexible. 2. Anything good from other editors will eventually make it into emacs. The first thing that comes to my mind is snippets which I think came from TextMate. Again, emacs is just too darn adaptable and flexible. That said, I don't recommend non-programmers or even new programmers learn emacs. It's a steep learning curve, it's just I've already climbed it, and now I delve even deeper to learn more about it whenever I can. I just don't have the technical investment in any other editor, and it's highly unlikely that any other editor, IDE, etc will ever have enough advantage to switch. Edit: Ooh, I just remembered this one: I'm not a big user of TRAMP, even though it's awesome, but it's even more awesome than I realized. A couple of weeks back, I was test-compiling and running our codebase on a new version of the OS, using a remote machine via ssh (forgot the -Y). I quickly found myself missing the M-g n and M-g p for moving through compile warnings and errors, so I loaded a remote edit session on my local emacs and without even thinking just ran a compile. To my wonder, it just Did What I Meant, and ran the compile on the remote machine, no special setup required! I mean, it was utterly seamless. It's this sort of thing that keeps me learning emacs and just marveling at how awesome it is!

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> To my wonder, it just Did What I Meant, and ran the compile on the remote machine, no special setup required! I mean, it was utterly seamless. It's this sort of thing that keeps me learning emacs and just marveling at how awesome it is! This will blow your mind then (as it did mine, when I discovered it): it also works like this for GDB sessions.
jnxx 6y ago
> That said, I don't recommend non-programmers or even new programmers learn emacs. Emacs is definitely more useful to people who use it somewhat frequently, as one has to memorize some key strokes. But, there is a good interactive tutorial, and I don't think that learning Emacs to the equivalent of a beginner's level of competence takes very long. A few afternoons perhaps, and one can go extending from that. And if you forget things, it is because you do not need them that often. This is also a kind of economy in there. Maybe other things are more important.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> To my wonder, it just Did What I Meant, and ran the compile on the remote machine, no special setup required! I mean, it was utterly seamless. It's this sort of thing that keeps me learning emacs and just marveling at how awesome it is! This will blow your mind then (as it did mine, when I discovered it): it also works like this for GDB sessions.

jnxx 6y ago

> That said, I don't recommend non-programmers or even new programmers learn emacs. Emacs is definitely more useful to people who use it somewhat frequently, as one has to memorize some key strokes. But, there is a good interactive tutorial, and I don't think that learning Emacs to the equivalent of a beginner's level of competence takes very long. A few afternoons perhaps, and one can go extending from that. And if you forget things, it is because you do not need them that often. This is also a kind of economy in there. Maybe other things are more important.