Over at the Emacs subreddit, analysis230 has a sort of confession. He had long considered the phrase “Emacs is not just a text editor” to be something geezer developers said as they clung desperately to an aging technology. He says he didn’t even know what it meant.
Then one day for unspecified reasons he decided to move from VS Code to Emacs. He was already familiar with the Vim keybindings so he was up and running (with Doom Emacs) in short order. He really liked modal editing and found himself wishing for a keyboard-driven file manager. That’s when he discovered dired and, as he put it, the penny dropped. He finally understood what everyone meant when they said that Emacs is not just a text editor.
He’s since moved on to installing Mu4e but his story makes an important point: it can be hard to understand and appreciate the power of Emacs until you’ve learned some basics and used it for a while. Lots of worthwhile things in life are like that.
Speaking of the “not just a text editor” quote, analysis230 says,
I know I heard people say that but I always thought of them as denial-filled ramblings of people who have sunk a decade into learning a tool that’s slowly fading. Apparently, not the case at all.
His post is, it seems to me, the perfect answer to those who complain that Emacs has a steep learning curve. It may have but the it’s worth the climb.