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If you learn vim or emacs, you will discover that for literally any task that is interacting with text in some form (plain text, code, spreadsheets, presentatio

If you learn vim or emacs, you will discover that for literally any task that is interacting with text in some form (plain text, code, spreadsheets, presentations), there is almost always an extension in these "text editors" (which really are working environments) that facilitates that work. Hence the claim that you only need to learn one tool rather than a dozen.

metafunctor 6y ago
I've been using Emacs for a lot of things for a quarter of a century. Mostly programming. Or, really, editing program source code plus some haphazard IDE features I've bothered to hack in. Emacs is definitely is not the only tool I need. It is ill suited for graphical tasks, sure, but it is also not the best tool for email, web browsing, taking notes, calendars, and a wide variety of other things. Sure, you CAN do most of those things in Emacs, but it's not the best tool out there for any of them. Emacs is a great IDE, but it simply doesn't exist on most of the platforms I use all the time to make in a realistic contender. Home surveillance? Password management? Backups? Website authoring? Keeping basketball scores? Managing personal photos? Learning a new language? Literally (and NOT figuratively!) most tasks are better done not in Emacs, but some other tool. I'm not sure why this needs to be said out loud. Yes, like a piece of paper, you can use it for any of those tasks. Almost anything can be viewed as a "text task". But it there are better tools out there for almost all of them.
- bitwize 6y ago
  > Emacs is a great IDE, but it simply doesn't exist on most of the platforms I use all the time to make in a realistic contender. Emacs is available on Windows, Mac, and all extant forms of Unix, so... are you talking about mobile platforms?