GNU Emacs

“It's a real head trip to see the power of emacs, and it feels like it's hard to explain to people why it's so fascinating (to me).”

“the sheer amount of person-years that have gone into making emacs and elisp a conjoined system makes it a pleasure to use and iterate on”

“The dynamism is the product, not an accident. Redefining any function at runtime, advising anything, inspecting live state”

“Infinite configurability and expandability (plus the lack of a "blessed set" standard that people actually like enough to use out-of-the-box)”

“I use Emacs still because it's astoundingly mediocre at all things that I use it for; but always mediocre and never terrible”

“It isn't the best code editor. It isn't the best note taker. It isn't the best document writer. It isn't even a good lisp.”

“Emacs isn't ready for the masses. Broken defaults, and a brittle experience once features are made working is standard.”

“emacs is a lisp machine, and exposes the highest level of granularity, and enables the finest level of customization for the user.”

“tools, particularly packages in Emacs, but also for VS Code and other IDEs, that make navigating nested s-expressions a breeze”

“There's something about hacking in elisp on the editor that you're using to do the hacking, that just makes me fall in love with programming again.”

“a malleable substrate you can programmatically change inside-out, it gives you immense capabilities to shape your environment”

“Multiple cursors, iedit, re-builder/visual-regex, editable occur, AST-based editing are just some of the features I use regularly in Emacs”

“The Emacs mark-and-point UI works for everyone: fully functional hands, partially functioning hands, or even speech recognition.”

“An application which is also a good platform may be worth a greater learning investment than a simpler application would justify.”

“I have been using emacs for the past couple of years. Started because I wanted to try out org mode and stayed for the extreme flexibility it offers.”

“any classic control key assignments, like those of vi or those of emacs, are far from optimal on a non-standard keyboard layout”

“Emacs with native-compilation, tree-sitter and LSP support (and stuff like Magit and ripgrep integration too) makes it really amazing.”

“The thing that makes it really self documenting is that these help commands reflect the live environment at the moment you use it”

“the built-in help commands are still useful because they're naturally tied to (and organized by) the core code entities that power Emacs”

“New features in the latest Emacs releases, and in successive releases of individual packages, have brought some nice improvements in those areas.”

“There just isn't anything like the old editors, built in the 80x24 terminal era, for getting huge swathes of code on your screen at once.”

“Its attraction, to this user at least, is the lifelong process of adaptation and discovery that molds it to the user, and the user to it.”

“I don't like that aspect of emacs, but if you are a heavy-duty editor user it becomes difficult to arrange a consistent set of emacs shortcuts”

“Emacs’ natural frame splitting and buffer selecting/switching commands are good enough if you dont display more than four buffers at a time”

“As much as I'm growing to love Emacs, there's something to be said for an editor that doesn't answer so many questions with "write a little Lisp"”

“It is a compiler, an editor, a pain-in-the-arse, one of the most brilliant uses of the blurring of the layers of App/os/hardware.”

“even the GUI version of it is mostly just looking like a terminal, not really taking advantage of the potential of graphical elements”

“It's extremely embarrassing how sloppy the emacs experience has gotten in the last thirty years relative to other environments.”

“I love Emacs' design. I think the cruft is minimal, and pretty much every line of code I studied had a good reason for being there.”

“I don't see how a Lisp platform with a web browser, a Tetris implementation, and 4 terminal emulators can be considered 'lightweight'.”

“Outside of Emacs (and possibly vim) with the ability to have dozens of ephemeral buffers open to modify their output I don't imagine they will be very useful.”

“Emacs's display engine is genuinely well-optimized: it handles overlays, faces, text properties, and redisplay regions efficiently.”

“when I C-' (M-x org-edit-special), it opens a temporary buffer with just the HTML... This has been a killer feature for me”

“It's the very reason I use these editors as you can have a screen fulls of opened files instead of the tabbed model of common editors.”

“Emacs versions around version 20 also were lacking things that I use today, but nothing that I could not learn to live without.”

“It feels absolutely empowering and immensely liberating to have access to EVERY single line of code running and affecting your system editor.”

“a piece of software that lets you get in situations where some portion of your "just create" time becomes "managing my custom emacs, please don't break"”

“It's the closest environment I've used to where the friction between "I wish my editor could do " and actually having the feature almost disappears.”

“Emacs' self-documenting nature makes it significantly easier to understand what certain actions do and how certain options work.”

“Emacs is not modern, to achieve the functionality of a modern editor/ide, with all the lessons/research done since the 70/80's it's going to take a huge amount of configuring.”