Alex Wulff has an interesting post that lists eight reasons that he believes shows that Emacs is the best editor. The Emacsistas on Irreal don’t need any reasons or posts; they’re already secure in their belief of Emacs’ supremacy. Still, it’s interesting to see what draws other users to Emacs.
Here are the eight things that Wulff says convinced him:
- Emacs is fast
- The super-efficient keyboard shortcuts for cursor movement and editing functions means that editing on Emacs is faster than on other editors.
- Emacs is Customizable
- This is, really, what makes Emacs so special.
- Emacs is available on just about every OS
- Every Unix system supports Emacs, of course, but so do others such as Windows.
- Emacs is easy to learn
- A lot of Emacs users will probably take exception this but only because there is so much to learn. Learning to perform any specific editing operation is pretty much the same as for any other editor.
- Emacs commands are available in Unix
- Any program using the readline library, such as Bash, has built-in support for many of the Emacs commands. It’s even better in macOS where basic Emacs commands are available system wide. Although Wulff doesn’t mention it, you can add many other Emacs keystrokes to macOS.
- Emacs buffers can contain almost anything
- “Anything” includes shell prompts, a Python REPL, a Common Lisp IDE, a mail client, an RSS reader, a music player, and many other things besides simple text.
- Emacs is old
- This fact is often cited by the heathens as a reason to eschew Emacs but, as Wulff says, it actually means that it’s had many years of loving attention from its developers in the service of perfecting it.
- Games
- Not something that I care about but many Emacs users enjoy taking a break to play Tetris or one of the other games. If nothing else, it shows how flexible the Emacs customization environment is.
Wulff has more to say on these things so take a look at his post to get the whole story.