I use emacs and have done for ~ 20 years, but I don't think this article would sell me on it if I didn't already. An editor is just an editor: an editor with a

I use emacs and have done for ~ 20 years, but I don't think this article would sell me on it if I didn't already. An editor is just an editor: an editor with a variety of unrelated crap (text adventure, tetris game, mail reader) bolted on the side is not obviously better, it might just be bloatier. The compelling feature of emacs is its extensibility and self-documenting nature: that Gnus exists is not a big deal, but that you could invent it if it didn't already exist - that's where the magic lies. Emacs is a habitable programming environment. If HN lets me post links in comments, here's an example from a little while ago showing how I once extended the Gnus email composer to check for missing attachments - http://ww.telent.net/2003/1/14/_updated_for_elisp_syntax_error_13_01_52_gmt http://ww.telent.net/2003/1/14/_updated_for_elisp_syntax_err... "First off, we didn’t need to restart emacs. In fact, we didn’t even need to load any files. All of this was done on the fly. Second, we didn’t at any point have to read an info manual, fiddle around in the filesystem, or search a web site to get to the documentation for anything. We had a little help from customize to tell us that ispell-message was a suitable function for this hook, but aside from that, all we needed to know was in function and variable docstrings."