Over at the Emacs subreddit, jackn3 noticed that a lot of experienced Emacs user describe Emacs as a program that’s fun to use and he wondered if the other redditers felt the same and if so why. The responses to his question are interesting.
A surprising number of the comments mention Lisp and how easy it is to configure or expand Emacs using it and how much fun it is to do so. I’m all in on Lisp so of course I agree with this but it’s surprising and heartening how many Emacs users agree. I guess all those comments about parentheses, how terrible Lisp is, and how Emacs would be much better if only it were written in JavaScript or some other non-Lisp language are a minority opinion. Or more likely the opinion of people who aren’t actually Emacs users. Regardless, a significant number of the commenters mentioned Lisp as one of the things that make Emacs so enjoyable.
By far the most prevalent answer to Jackn3’s question was that its configurability makes it easy to adapt Emacs to your way of working instead of the other way around. That’s been a constant theme here at Emacs. It’s hard to overstate what a win it is to have an editor that you can configure to match your workflow.
If you have a few minutes to spare, take a look at the post. The answers will make you glad that you’re an Emacs user.