[unshavedyak]

As a long time Vim/Kakoune/Helix user, i've never really understood the difference tbh. Clearly i've never tried, but getting comfortable enough in a new editor, especially one that deviates so much from your norm, is quite the chore.

From the outside Emacs never drew me in. It didn't do anything "bad", but the premise behind vim (motion actions, etc) just sounded logical, like building blocks , and as a result drew me in for being easier to understand the basics of.

I could never grasp what Emacs even "was", as a pre-vim beginner. To this day i still don't know, but my general assumption is it's more built around commands rather than little primitives like Vim does. Which, seems fine - just never was enough to hook me.

These days i'm mulling on my own editor and i should probably better understand Emacs. I've watched some guides on Org Mode, which is a big area of focus for me, but even that just seems like Markdown with an LSP (link jumping/etc), so i still must be missing something heh.

[kleiba]

Well, for one, org-mode predates Markdown (not by much, but anyway), and it is not just the syntax but also a lot of usage functionality. However, while a lot of people use Emacs especially because of org-mode, I almost never use it, although Emacs has been my daily driver for over 25 years.

For me, the concept of modal editing has never been appealing, so even though I know some basic vi, I never got into it. Perhaps I was influenced to some degree from taking some HMI classes in college (see Larry Tesler), I don't know.

Emacs is really just an editor, but it was built from the get-go to be super-hackable and has a very solid modular architecture, based on well thought-out concepts. That allows it to offer specialized functionality for different file types in the form of add-ons ("modes"), and it allows every end-user to fine-tune the editor to their own liking.

If you want to get a grasp of its capabilities, check out the "Emacs rocks!" series [0] - it's a bunch of short videos demonstrating some interesting things you can do with Emacs.

[0] https://emacsrocks.com/

[bloopernova]

Emacs is a text processing environment. Everything is a command: even hitting the down arrow is calling a specific command in Emacs Lisp. This means you can modify almost any behaviour or Emacs. Want to add some new action to the down arrow? You can easily do that with Emacs.

(I'm not trying to convert you, I'm just trying to get across what Emacs is)

Emacs exposes lots of rich functionality to the user.