Chris Maiorana has a lovely blog post in which he makes the case that Emacs users are a different breed. He starts with the quotidian observation that you can be pretty sure that a Vim or VSCode user is either a software developer or in a closely related such field such as System Administration or DevOps. Emacs users, on the other hand, could come from almost anywhere.
This is a point that Irreal is fond of making. I’m fascinated by people from outside the software field who use Emacs as an essential part of their workflow. Their stories always illustrate the power and flexibility of Emacs to solve problems even if they aren’t about software and engineering.
What distinguishes Emacs users, Maiorana claims, is their love of tinkering and the blurring of work and play when they’re using Emacs. As he puts it
Emacs could be more than a text editor. It could be an organizer, a scratchpad, a dictionary, a canvas, a database, a calendar, an email client, and much more. What should have been work started to feel like fun.
Maiorana says that Emacs users don’t care primarily about the usefulness or user friendliness of Emacs; it’s the opportunity for tinkering that attracts them. I think he has this part backwards. Emacs users surely do love to tinker but the attractive thing about Emacs is that your tinkering can turn it into the exact tool that you need. That’s true even if the tool you need has nothing to do with software or its siblings.
Emacs is, in fact, the perfect piece of software. Not only does it indulge our urge to tinker and have fun but also allows us to turn that tinkering into the precise tool we need. Not just once but as often as we desire as our needs change. With Emacs, the fun never ends.