[andirk]

In vi (which apparently is vim by default I was told?) I know open, save, quit, go to line, go to begin/end of line, find, insert, delete line.

We used emacs in college and that was the last time I used any text editor serverside besides vi. Am I missing out?

[throw10920]

If you only care about the features you listed - no, you're not missing out on anything.

Emacs is a great extensible platform for writing textual applications that happens to come with a mediocre text editor. If you like automating things or enjoy having development environments that fit you like a glove, you'll want to learn Emacs - it'll pay off in a few years. (this describes me)

But not everyone fits that description, and that's totally fine. I know many software engineers who have been working for decades in vanilla vim, and they're still incredibly productive. VSCode, too, comes with sane out of the box defaults and a large extension ecosystem.

There's probably an analogy to be made here between flexible languages (Lisp, Haskell, C++ kind-of) and inflexible languages (Python, Java) - some people really want to develop DSLs to perfectly express their problem, but others are ok with a slightly awkward mismatch due to a rigid language, and are still incredibly productive and happy.

(however, aside from practical use, I find the design of Emacs to be quite beautiful and inspiring, and encourage you to take a look at it anyway when you have some time)

[rtpg]

I think Emacs is appealing to those who want to quickly write customizations to their text editor.

When working on certain projects, I'll sometimes write a code snippet of elisp to handle some task I find myself doing a lot (things like "fold all fragments of this bespoke file format which includes some string"). The fact that Emacs Lisp is a "real programming language" is nice, and the way that it's very easy to inspect what a certain key command does means that you can very quickly set something up.

This lower barrier to entry is nice for people who really want to make things very close to right. Things like "set up a custom error checker based on this validator command and add highlighting to the text based on it" is as simple as setting up something in flycheck and setting up some regular expressions.

So I think it's interesting for people who like IDEs but want it to be easier to mold and understand, more than people who have a simple text editor but want "more".