Emacs

What is it?

A very old text editor dating back to the 70’s.

Emacs is less of a text editor and more of a text editing platform. You can:

• Use as a kind of IDE
• Check your email
• Organize TODO items

Why use it?

• Insanely configurable
• Habit
• Efficient if you know how to use it
• Especially useful if you edit a lot of plain text
• Large ecosystem, email, TODO, etc.

It’s a bit circular. You use emacs because you edit a lot of text. But you arrange to edit a lot of text (choosing text formats, etc.) because editing text can be done so effectively in Emacs.