[volforix]

After using Emacs for years (huge fan!) I finally realized that Emacs hinders my productivity instead of improving it. Thus I moved to other tools, sadly, and never looked back.

In this case I would use Text Extractor (part of M$ PowerToys) and Google Translate.

[nonrandomstring]

For me the consistency of Emacs lies not only in its user interface but in stable longevity. Productivity is important, yes, but is only one dimension in complex decision space of software. What will you use next year when Microsoft throws its powertoys out of the pram and Google makes translate obsolete? Emacs is almost 50 years old, and I hope to be using it in another 50.

[volforix]

Good point. I'll switch back to Emacs as soon as it's best tool for my task again.

[sigmonsays]

What is the purpose of making a statement like this and not providing any details?

[iLemming]

> After using Emacs for years (huge fan!) I finally realized that Emacs hinders my productivity instead of improving it.

I always take these kinds of statements with a grain of salt. Please don't get me wrong, perhaps, you had objective reasons to move from Emacs. Maybe you thought they were objective reasons, even though they weren't as such. I spoke to many "former Emacs users", and in most cases, it usually turns out that either: the person had shallow exposure or limited knowledge, or they've never attempted to learn modern Emacs packages and how they can interoperate. In most cases, they've never written a single Emacs package to solve their personal use cases, let alone publish one for the public.

I'm not saying that Emacs cannot reduce productivity. Oh, no, it very well can. And very often it drags you into the rabbit hole of "improving your workflow". It can be extremely frustrating, even for someone "after years of using Emacs" to attempt to fix a simple problem as the desired placement for a window. The complexity of choice can be exhausting. Especially, at moments when you're "in the zone" of trying to solve an unrelated problem. Emacs can get in the way. And most people just can't find the discipline to continue. Often they'd give up, without even trying. And the "novelty bias" of using different IDE creates an illusion that they have wasted time with Emacs.

The truth is - learning Emacs is a journey. You just need to keep going. And at some point, you may realize that there's simply nothing better than Emacs out there that can simplify your workflow and increase your productivity when dealing with textual information.

- Emacs has a better search. It offers way too many different ways for searching things - locally, remotely, recursively, partially, contextually, dynamically, etc. With filtering the results and sifting through and editing at the same time.

- It has some amazing window manipulation capacities. You can precisely control how, where, and what gets to show up on the screen, without having to constantly move things around, drag and resize with the mouse.

- Its extensibility simply cannot be matched. I just can't imagine anyone building let's say an InteliJ plugin, with a command that calls a function defined in a different plugin but also redefines some specific calls in that function to its internal, private methods. In Emacs, I can pick a function defined (for example) in Magit, look at the source code, and tell it to redirect its internal, private calls to my own substitute, whenever it gets called.

Emacs not only improves productivity. It brings joy to the process of writing. Writing just anything - text, math formulas, or code. But getting to that point is not quick or straightforward.

And of course, just like anything, Emacs is not a universally guaranteed tool to make you more productive or happy. Some people just "don't get it", and that's quite all right. But for many, there isn't a better alternative. You can offer a myriad of other tools claiming that the combination of them makes you insanely productive, and to that, I would say: "great, I'll delegate some calls to them from within Emacs..."