Over at the Emacs subreddit, rebcabin-r has a short post on Ergonomics and Emacs. By ergonomics he doesn’t mean the usual issues of RSI and overused pinkies. Rather, he’s talking about a comfortable environment for writing and coding.
His experience closely parallels mine. He says that he looks forward to using Emacs and can work in it all day without being exhausted. Other apps, even “good” apps like Mathematica and IntelliJ, wear him out. Just today, I was working on a computer without Emacs and it was excruciating. I felt like taking a nap afterwards.
When I’m using Emacs—and especially Org mode—work just flows and I know that I can export whatever I’m writing to whatever format I need. Similarly, if I’m coding I know I can compile and even run the code without ever leaving Emacs.
My experience is that mouse usage plays a large part in this. If I can avoid the mouse things go a lot smoother. Part of that is probably because I have a lot of the Emacs navigation bindings available everywhere in macOS. Another aspect to my optimized workflow is the use of Alfred to minimize mouse use. As I’ve learned more about Alfred and internalized its use, I’ve mostly avoided using the mouse except within Safari. Even there, I can use Alfred to bring up Websites so my main mouse use in scrolling and clicking on links.
Still, nothing is more comfortable and natural to me than Emacs. I’m with rebcabin-r: I’m never completely happy working on my computer unless I’m in Emacs.