Comment by iLemming

You perfectly just illustrated my original point of "without the slightest attempt to even understand what kind of philosophy makes it appealing..."

Saying "I can just use my pdf editor" is on the same level of "integration" as pulling another laptop with a pdf next to the one you have already. What I'm talking about is something like ITEE (Integrated Text Editing Environment), and you simply just don't get it. Emacs allows you to get closer to the plain text as possible. And the value of the plain text proposition is enormous. When every bit of information is reduced to text — it allows you to manipulate information more easily. In Emacs, everything becomes text — the list of directories and files? You can freely edit them — using all the editor features you have — multiple cursors, search-find-replace, macros, whatever. Extracting a bunch of URLs from a web page, or a PDF? Easy. Finding a specific URL from that list and retrieving a description for it? Piece-of-cake. Your browser history — it's just text. Various search engines? They are just a middle-man and you talk to them in text. Version-control interactions? All happen in text. etc. etc.

Of course, browsers allow you to do a ton of interesting things, and btw. it's not using Emacs 'instead', but rather having a choice — e.g., I do use zsh, but some things I do in Eshell in a much more productive way.

Browsers, shells, specific apps, scripting engines, etc. I have no problem using them when I see fit, but it really seems like you have zero idea how actually awesome it is to be able to not only perform spell-checking, but also consult the Merriam-Webster thesaurus, get the definitions for specific words (from another service), translate entire sentences and paragraphs (e.g. via google translate), parley with a bunch of LLM models, perform web search and etymology lookup, consult your own notes and knowledge-base, check through your browser history, etc. etc., and all that "on point" — in the same context and place where you're composing a piece of text. Like a comment you're replying on Hacker News. The mental model between approaches is just vastly different. It puts you into the "flow state" described by renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. And btw., If you think I had to leave my text editor even for a second, to lookup his name to mention it here — you still don't get it.