SnipingMan18 has posed an interesting questions on the Emacs sub-reddit: How would you describe the Emacs philosophy in a single line? If you’re an Emacser, take a moment to think how you would answer that question.
My answer popped into my head almost immediately so I read all the comments to see if anyone had the same take: no one did. Some of the answers were silly, but others made a lot of sense. For example, it’s hard to argue that “the extensible editor” captures (at least one) essence of Emacs. Another nice answer was “have it your way.” That certainly captures an important part of Emacs as I’ve often noted. Another good candidate is “the DIY editor”.
All of those answers provide a good, concise, précis of what Emacs is about but none of them nail down what makes it so special to me. Regular readers won’t be surprised that my answer is “Lisp machine lite” or something like that. The point is that Emacs is not merely an editor but an operating environment to handle all your routine chores. It is, in fact, an environment for hackers to solve problems in, even if those problems don’t involve writing code.
As I’ve said many times, the only app other than Emacs that I spend significant time in is Safari. When Emacs finally solves the problem of providing a usable Web interface—sorry, EWW is not there yet—probably 95% of my tube time will be spent in Emacs.
Your answer may differ but it’s hard to argue that Emacs provides an useful and powerful Lisp environment.