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by krylon
3349 days ago
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To me, the appeal is that emacs is not so much a text editor, but a development and runtime environment for a custom programming language that happens to be designed with building text editors in mind. For practically any given programming language I might want to use, emacs either supports it out of the box, or there is a package available that makes emacs support it. Plus, it is kind of an integration machine in a much more comprehensive sense than most IDEs - inside emacs, I can run a shell, a web browser, a mail client (although I don't do that), a file manager, an IRC client, an audio player (including last.fm scrobbling!), read xkcd, and much more (don't get me started on org-mode, I am still just beginning to scratch the surface of that). Being able to use it for so many purposes means that all the skill and muscle memory I acquire in using it pays of many times over across all those use cases. Any customization or extension I make is potentially available across all those use cases. |
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Over the last year I have been spending more time (again) in Emacs to the point where I am not even renewing my JetBrains yearly licenses.
Sorry if this is too off topic, but I have been reading computer scientist Cal NewPort's books (Deep Work, and Be So Good They Can't Ignore You) and he talks a lot about craftsmanship. Automating our workflows seems pretty much core to craftsmanship and it is probably easier to do this in Emacs than writing IDE plugins.