Over at the Emacs subreddit, dehaticoder asks what things do you do in Emacs that make people say “Wow”. I’m probably an easy mark but I really love this type of post. They’re always enjoyable and sometimes I even learn something new. If you also enjoy these kinds of posts or want to learn some new techniques, take a look at dehaticoder’s post.
A lot of the answers are what you’d expect: Org mode, Magit, TRAMP, narrowing, and keyboard macros. Others had more specialized answers. One responder said that the thing that always elicited gasps of amazement from his coworkers was the speed at which he could make edits, and switch to other files or even machines, all without touching the mouse, of course.
My favorite was a variation on the grep/wgrep/make changes to grep buffer/save back to original files workflow that I first wrote about here. The simplest case is changing every occurrence of foo to bar in a set of files but the same technique can do more complicated tasks. Other suggestions were undo in region and undo tree that treats the undo history for the tree that it is.
There isn’t much ankle biting in the replies so it’s pleasant to read through them. As I said, you may even learn some new ideas for your own Emacs workflow.