All of us long term Emacs users have our favorite Emacs features. Sometimes it’s something big. For me that would be Org or Ivy/Counsel/Swiper. Other’s would choose Magit, Dired, Elfeed, or Mu4e. In a sense, those are the easy choices. But what about your favorite small feature?
There’s tons of little Emacs features that make our editing life easier. There are, for example, backward-kill-word and transpose-chars both of which I use all the time. Some of you will say, “Wha?! Who cares about that stuff.” Others will say, “Yeah me too.” We all have our favorites.
Fernando Borretti has his own favorite. In his case, it’s fill-paragraph. That’s a command that wraps the lines in your buffer to fit into whatever line length you’ve specified. I used to use it all the time too but have since moved to visual-line-mode that pretty much takes care of all that for me.
Borretti is especially concerned about maintaining indentation in his prose. I write all my prose with Org mode, which has markup to handle indentation so I’ve never had to worry about that. My main reason for moving to visual-line-mode was that fill-paragraph added hard newlines, which messed up the display on smaller devices like smartphones, while visual-line-mode deals with virtual lines that are reformatted by the target device.
Borretti says that fill-paragraph is what keeps him from moving to the Zed editor—it’s the little things that keeps us coming back. As for me, Emacs offers so many features and eases my workflow so much that I can’t imagine switching to anything else.