JTR over at The Art Of Not Asking Why has a post that explores why Emacs is the right thing. He begins with a story of a Porche owner who often has to drive in countries that require cars to have right hand drives1. Rather than give up their beloved Porche, they simply modified the car to have an adjustable steering wheel that could be set to either side.
JTR, of course, compares this to using Emacs. Others may lay down restrictions but with Emacs you can simply change it to adapt to those restrictions. As JTR says, sadly, for a lot of apps, configurabilty boils down to choosing between light and dark modes. Those apps force you to work the way they want you to. They give no thought to how you like to do things; they provide a solution and you have to use it whether you like it or not. These apps present a mental challenge: you have to do things that aren’t natural to you in order to work with them.
An example that JTR gives is date formats. Apple apps and many others prefer the US date format but the YYYY-MM-DD format is clearly superior. For one thing, it will sort dates correctly. I think of it as being like the Chinese personal naming convention of Last Name followed by first name. It’s the same principle of stating things in order of more general to more specific.
The main point is that Emacs allows you to adjust it to work the way you prefer. That’s sadly lacking in the majority of applications.
Footnotes:
JTR speculates that this is the UK or Ireland but although they both drive on left side of the road there is nothing that requires a car to be a right hand drive. Perhaps there are other regions that do require this but I’ve never heard of one. More likely, the story is a metaphor.