Ayrat Badykov has a nifty short post on why he thinks Emacs is a great text editor. As for many developers, Badykov was inspired to learn Emacs when he saw how much more efficient the Vim and Emacs users were compared to users of the other editors who had to click, swipe, and use menus to get anything done. His reason for choosing Emacs over Vim was—as it often is—a matter of happenstance: the people he was working with were Emacs users.
His reasons for believing Emacs is great are the usual: efficiency, Magit, Org-mode, terminal emulations, server mode\(…\) . The thing that stuck with me was his final observation:
I remember a quote from another of my colleagues, “I learned emacs so I could use a text editor like I’m playing guitar”. This quote contains some kind of truth. Like musical instruments for musicians, text editors are the same tools for developers.
It’s a good metaphor. Like a musical instrument, Emacs takes lots of practice and effort but the result can be beautiful. I’m tempted to push the analogy with comparisons like Gilmour on the guitar to digital music players but you get the idea.