Eamonn Sullivan has a post that describes Emacs as A Well-Honed Tool. If you’re an Emacs user, your immediate response is probably, “Well, yeah!” but Sullivan’s point is more than just Emacs is a great editor. There is, as he says, a reason he uses an editor that’s almost as old as he is.
Emacs has been around long enough that several generations of users have worked on sanding down the rough edges and making it an extraordinarily useful tool. But, of course, the real story is that you can make Emacs into whatever you want: you can add new functionality or completely rewrite existing functionality because Emacs is written almost entirely in its own extension language.
Sullivan is an interesting case study because he has had two careers: in journalism and as a programmer. That gives him a foot in both Emacs user camps. He has used it as someone with a traditional liberal arts job and as someone with a program development job. That means he has probably explored more of Emacs functionality than most of us working in only one of those environments.
A subplot of the post is that he wrote a bit of code that largely automates the mechanics of making a blog post. The code is, he says, not particularly sophisticated and just bombs out if there’s an error but it was quick to write and solved a problem he was having. He expects that the code will evolve and get better but in the mean time, that problem is solved.
This is the type of thing I—and I’m sure most of you—are always doing: we’re performing some boring, mechanical task for the \(n^{\text{th}}\) time and suddenly realize we could write a bit of Elisp to do it with a couple of keystrokes. We may or may not evolve the code but that boring, mechanical task has been banished from our workflow.
Emacs really is a well-honed tool.