Comment by iLemming
7 hours ago
Neovim is a text editor. You can't compare Emacs with just a text editor. Just like you can't compare Emacs with a browser, music player, note-taking app, email client, etc. Emacs, first and foremost, is a Lisp REPL, with an embedded text editor. Without deeply understanding and respecting this aspect it is difficult to appreciate what Emacs could be, what you can do with it.
Imagine this — one morning I was watching my colleague showing me a bunch of things over a Zoom video, and I didn't feel comfortable interrupting him with "wait, don't scroll away, I didn't get that, allow me to read it", "hold on, I'm taking notes", etc. I sacrificed my lunch break to write a small Elisp command that runs tesseract to OCR the image in the clipboard. Now, I don't even have to ask my colleagues for explanations or tell them to share the url they are currently browsing — I can just grab it with a couple of keystrokes to make a note. And that's just one, single, isolated example. It cost me twenty minutes of my time. Twenty minutes of investment that paid itself many times over already. And I have tons of similar examples.
And this is why I stay away from eMacs.
"Staying away" implies understanding the perils or benefits, I don't think you ever fully understood either. My point is not to bash on your choice of an editor — I use Neovim myself (it serves me well occasionally).
You "stay away" from Emacs most likely because you don't know any better. Do you use your editor to read and annotate pdfs? Or watch videos? Or manage the library of your ebooks? Or track your expenses? Or control project management like Jira? Or keep your knowledge base and note-taking? Or interact with LLMs? Or explore APIs like Postman? Or keep your spaced repetition flash cards like Anki? Or use it for chat over platforms like Telegram and Slack? Or find and read RFCs and manpages? Or to perform web-search, search through your browser history, Wikipedia, Youtube? Do you have etymology lookup, thesaurus, dictionaries, translation? Or to order pizza? Or measure distances between coordinates on a map? Automate things based on solar calendar or moon phases? Manage all your configs, aka dotfiles? List, browse and code review Pull Requests, etc., etc.
Now tell me, what a sane person ever exposed to all this usefulness would ever reject it? Only those who never had patience to reach it, or those who are oblivious to the possibilities.