I’ve been seeing a lot of references to Christoffer Stjernlöf’s (slightly old) post on Two Wrong about Why You Should Buy Into the Emacs Platform. It seems to me to offer a nice coda to my two posts on ancient editors. It fits in with that discussion because it looks at another reason to spend the time to learn and master Emacs.
The TL;DR is extensibility but that characterization misses the point of what Stjernlöf is saying. His thesis is that Emacs is really a framework for writing text-based tools. That means that it can be—if you like—more than an editor. You can use it to read mail, follow your RSS feed, play music, and all sorts of other things. But even considered as a text editor, the ease with which you can write editing tools is a powerful benefit.
Gosh, that fancy editor over there has this feature called multiple cursors. You don’t have to switch editors or beg maintainers to add the feature to Emacs, you can do it yourself just as Magnar Sveen did. What this means is other editors can’t be more powerful because whatever feature makes them seem that way can be added to Emacs relatively easily (Sveen had a first hack at multiple cursors working after just 2 hours). It can be added by an individual user even if no one else cares about or is interested in the feature.
Isn’t that a capability you’d like your editor to have? Different people have different needs and priorities but to my way of thinking that capability alone makes it worthwhile to spend the time mastering Emacs.