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by krylon 3134 days ago
It took me a few years to undertand this, but Emacs is not really a text editor. It is a development and runtime environment for a programming language that is especially useful for building text editors - and more generally, text-related, interactive programs -, and it happens to come bundled with a variety of such programs. But there are many, many more to discover out there on the Internet. In fact, in recent versions, this, too has gotten easier, since Emacs now comes with a package manager. But it can also be an IRC client, an audio player, a web browser, a database frontend, ... the possibilities are practically endless.

And this is why I love Emacs. There are other editors out there that are good, too. Very good. But to me, Emacs takes the prize because it is so much more than an editor.

1 comments

Always seemed to me less a text editor and more the intended user interface after rms and his gang of misfit lads finished herding up all the daemons into the eventual (past my expiration date) GNU/HURD. Turns out it was a Lisp machine all along!

That said, I too have developed a renewed appreciation for Emacs these past few years.

> Turns out it was a Lisp machine all along!

Hehe, in retrospect it is so obvious, but I really did not see that coming.