Ten years ago, Bozhidar Batsov wrote a post entitled Why Emacs. It was a short essay on why he used Emacs, what was good about it, and what its shortcomings were. Ten years later, Batsov, like most of us, is a different person doing a different job.
Back then he was a programmer, mostly concerned with writing code but also writing a blog, (think), that he also wrote in Emacs so he could be said to be using Emacs for most of his text editing needs. These days he’s moved into management and no longer spends much time coding except for his OSS projects and the majority of his prose is written in Slack and Google Docs.
Still, Batsov continues to love Emacs and be one of the most prominant evangelists for it. He’s just written a retrospective on his post, Why Emacs: Redux. A lot of things haven’t changed: Emacs (and Vim) are still the premier way of editing text and Emacs’ extensibility is still unrivaled and the thing that sets it apart.
On the other hand, Emacs has not stood still. It has more packages than ever, it has rudimentary multithreading, a builtin JSON parser, good support for LSP, and, of course, native compilation. Emacs is definitely not standing still.
All of that is true but for me the real virtue of Emacs is power. The power to efficiently edit text, the power to extend it in virtually any direction I want, and the power to make it a Lisp-Machine-like operating environment.
Take a look at both posts. They’re interesting and a reminder of why we love Emacs so much.