Why Emacs?

Once you decided that you want to use a single editor all the time, for the rest of your life, you will agree that there are obvious minimum requirements this text editor should meet:

• It should run on all the major operating systems. If you cannot guarantee that you will always have the freedom to choose what platform you are working on, and that you will never want to switch to another operating system, you surly don’t want to spend hours/days/months/years learning a tool that does not work on your next workplace. I am perfectly fine with tools that work only on a single system, as long as they are easy to replace. A text editor is not one of these tools.

• It needs to be highly extensible. This is maybe the most important property you should consider. If you have to rely on the editors core development team, you will wait forever for the features you need. Development teams have schedules, priority lists, other projects and, most dreadful of all, their own vision of how to work with a text editor. But if anyone can extend the tool and put the extensions online, the number of your editors features raises from n to infinity.

• Like with an operating system, a text editor is good for end users if it is easy for developers to build stuff on top of it. Things that make developers happy include rich APIs, a powerful programming language and seamless integration of the new features into the platform.

• The editor needs to be popular. A huge community means active development, lots of existing extensions and support. If you want to use that thing 10 years from now, someone has to continue working on it.

Once you rule out all the editors that miss one of these requirements, you will find that there are not that many choices left anyway.

The next thing you have to decide is how much time you really want to to invest. If you do a lot of text processing and you are willing to study ways to improve it, you might first consider Vim. Vim is a beautiful and intelligent designed, scriptable and powerful text editor ready to use.

Consider Emacs if editing text is so important to your life that it makes sense to invest hours/days/month/years to create a tailor-made tool that is perfectly suited to exactly your way of working. A tool that does all the things that you want the way you like it. Be aware that you should bring some technical skills with you, and hacking lisp on a Sunday evening should sound like fun.