Over at the Emacs subreddit, Ok-Machine-6265 is a new(ish) Emacs user who has some thoughts after using Emacs for about a year and a half. His experience has been good. He loves the power that Emacs gives him and lists some of its many benefits:
- Configurability
- Visibility into all aspects of Emacs’ code and data
- Keyboard centricity: no mouse required
- Stability: core functions just work
and finally, Emacs is an editor for hackers and those who want to make it their own. You don’t have to customize it, of course, but if you need special operations, Emacs makes it possible and easy to add then.
As usual, a lot of the wisdom is in the comments. Ok-Machine-6265 had a few complaints:
- Emacs can be slow to load large files
- There are so many commands that it’s easy to forget their key bindings.
The commenters suggest many solutions to these problems. For example, the wonderful which-key goes a long way in helping you remember key sequences. It’s a third part app that I’ve been using for a long time but, happily, it will be builtin as of Emacs 30.
One of the things that Ok-Machine-6265 says is that Emacs is 100% configurable and one of the commenters objected to that saying that, for example, changing the behavior of Meta in Org mode is apt to break things. The commenters responded, and I agree, that 100% compatibility is not the same as easily reconfiguarable. It may be easy or it may be hard but at the end of the day, almost everything in Emacs is configurable.