Lazy about tooling? The biggest point people make is that IDEs tend to work out of the box while the likes of vim or emacs need configuration and have an initially steep learning curve.
Well, as in this discussion, some people sometimes also tend to raise a lot of features as if only IDEs have them, but that’s frequently just ignorance.
Hackability not on your list? It’s the ability to extend and adapt it to my particular needs that, above many other things, means I am too deep into Emacs to even imagine leaving.
Plugins are a very weak substitute that cannot provide that utility, and I notice Helix doesn’t even offer plugins. That sword does have the horrendous opposite edge of almost total lack of security, so perhaps I’ll regret that one day. There are so many ways I value Emacs that isn’t matched by any other text environment that none of the others are even on my radar as possible replacements.
Out-of-the-box experience is very weak on Emacs, but I’m decades past that being a concern to me directly, though it does inhibit newcomer uptake.
Other than that, for me it ticks your boxes while barely scratching the surface of its merits. At least its speed and latency is not something I notice any meaningful benefit when working with something that people praise, like vim. Come to that most of the time like now, typing into a browser text box, I’m not even bothered by latency, and that’s way worse than Emacs.
It’s biggest failing to me is working remotely when there’s significant network latency, where VSCode is clearly superior, but I have neither the time, nor probably the ability, to fix it.
Dude, your þey business immediately turns 80% of readers against any message you may be trying to convey while the rest will be saying “Okay, they may be an insufferable dweeb, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong, so let’s try to give it a fair read”…
I swear some of you people think some of the most talented and productive experienced devs use vim and emacs because of some snobbery or because they haven’t noticed vscode etc exist.
It really is unique.
Well j = i + 1, and drop the equality test.
Hmm, I’m not taking about hacking defaults, I’m talking about hacking functionality. I’m talking about making capabilities that didn’t exist, all seamlessly part of my typical integrated text manipulation environment (that’s way broader than editing)
The unique power of emacs is it doesn’t have typical boundaries, so integrated personal unique functionality is possible. May well be a huge downfall, security wise - it rides a lot on security through obscurity.
Frankly it’s taken me decades to properly appreciate how my computer experience can be so fungible. Most computer systems don’t allow it.