[alfiedotwtf]

lol, logged in to say the same thing!

I found for me that the epiphany came when I realised three things:

1. Key bindings are just calling Emacs functions in the current runtime, which you yourself can call from Elisp

2. Holy shit, you mean every keystroke is ALSO just a function that you can call yourself meaning you can automate everything with Elisp?!!

3. Wait. Emacs is just an Elisp runtime where some of the functions can edit text buffers!!!!

Why is this cool? Because it means that Emacs is NOT an editor - it’s a virtual machine holding libraries of functions that do useful things, which YOU then customise into YOUR editor.

In other words - Emacs is a toolkit that allows you creator your own editor/environment, customised to your specific workflow. And if you don’t like it, you have the power to fix it yourself, which is in contrast to every other editor I know of which was built by the editor developers with their own idea of how you should edit text

[kmstout]

To go along with (2), "C-h k <KEY SEQUENCE>" and "M-x view-lossage" are excellent starting points for investigating what any key stroke means. From there, one can follow links in function and variable help all the way to the relevant elisp definitions.

If only that ease of hood-popping were more common.

[alfiedotwtf]

This.

I’m a Rust dev so Zed looked like a win for me (my Elisp ain’t that good), but it doesn’t have the same immediate extensibility that you get used to… and sadly it doesn’t run inside containers because it needs accelerated video :sad face: