It's hard to explain when there are all these reasonably featureful programming editors and IDEs going around. The key realisation to have is that even today I

It's hard to explain when there are all these reasonably featureful programming editors and IDEs going around. The key realisation to have is that even today I spend a huge amount of time just editing text. Commenting on HN? Editing text. Emails? Editing text. Coding? Editing text. Once you have that "everything is text" realisation, there are two ways to make the most of it. One is to have an editor that's easily called from other places (e.g., vim) and the other is to have an editor that can be integrated into everything (e.g., emacs). I started using emacs over a decade ago, and it keeps growing and changing to best suit my workflow. And yes, that includes reading mail.