The tell in your message (and those in general from vim users), is insisting on treating Emacs as an editor, and comparing it primarily on that benchmark. Ther

The tell in your message (and those in general from vim users), is insisting on treating Emacs as an editor, and comparing it primarily on that benchmark. There are no shortage of Emacs lovers and users who will accept that vim is a better editor. You didn't need to try Emacs to gain that appreciation. The other tell (common on HN, which has a clear selection bias), is comparing Emacs to an IDE like VS Code. Many, if not the majority, of Emacs users are not primarily using Emacs for coding. > Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. Neither follows the Unix philosophy well. And as many people have pointed out, most of the Unix utilities are poor at following it well.[1] The amusing thing about the Unix philosophy is that when you stay within Emacs, the Emacs environment is a much better exemplar of the Unix philosophy than Unix and its tools are. It is a lot easier to compose functionalities in different Emacs packages than it is in UNIX. I was using a Mastodon client for Emacs and wanted to render LaTeX formulae into rendered equations. I'm an average elisp coder and I got this working in under an hour by composing different Emacs packages. There are various ChatGPT clients out there. I wanted to integrate it with my Emacs email client (notmuch). It's not a lot of work. I doubt one could integrate things into mutt as quickly/easily. When reading an email in Mutt, how easy is it to quickly do a Web/network query on a selected text, perform analysis on the result, and display the outcome within Mutt? The analogue is fairly easy in Emacs, despite the mail tool(s) there not having any functionality to do this. As for Mutt in general: I used it for about a decade. While it has a soft spot in my heart, there is a reason I switched to an Emacs client - before I knew anything about customizing Emacs with elisp. There were lots of gaps in Mutt that other clients out there filled. I miss nothing from Mutt, other than the color scheme. In many of these cases, there are simply no quick, viable solutions outside of Emacs. People spend a lot of time doing these things in Emacs because it enables them to do more than they could otherwise. Imagine someone who doesn't know any programming complaining about someone else who does. To them they just see a person "wasting" all their time on another "tool". [1] An example: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/05/25/unix-doesnt-follow-the-unix-philosophy/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/05/25/unix-doesnt-follow... I've had the same visceral reaction when dealing with grep and find. Overly complex and bloated (albeit extremely useful).