Over at the Emacs subreddit, alraban tells a nice story about game development with Emacs. The TL;DR is that it’s amazingly good. Alraban isn’t a professional developer but has been a hobbyist since the 80s. He has, several times, tried to write a game but never made anything he felt was performant enough to ship.
Recently he decided to try again. He used the Godot engine because he wanted to work with FOSS tools but he didn’t like the builtin editor or GUI so as a long time Emacs user, he thought he’d give Emacs a try.
Airaban was amazed at how good the experience was. The amazement wasn’t that you could develop games in Emacs—of course you can; people are doing it everyday—but at how good the tooling was and at how smooth and delightful the process was. Even as a long term user who “pretty much live[d] in Emacs” he was surprised at how much tooling there was available and how good it was. As he puts it,
It was like starting a home improvement project I’d never done before, and discovering that I already had all the tools I needed in the basement.
Most of us are pretty familiar with the Emacs tooling associated with our normal tasks. The takeaway from airaban’s post is that you’re apt to be surprised at what’s available when you move to a new task.
This is a short post and only takes a couple of minutes to read. It’s well worth your time.