Why Emacs?
Table of Contents
"Why, oh, why use an ancient 30 year old program nowadays?"
1 When the whole is more than its parts
What's the point of using Emacs for everything - editing whatever code, compiling, debugging, version control, mail and news, shell and REPL, DB prompts, remote access, document reading and writing, planning, chat, even browsing? For each of those there would be some specialised program that does similar or better things and even friendlier to users.
- All-Emacs means more or less consistent interface. No need to learn another specialised program with its specific set of idioms however simplified.
- Integration between different modules is much easier. Making different programs even communicate would require tons of technical quirks if those programs were not intended for this. And this is not in the hands of the users.