What makes emacs a good editor?

Question

Am planning on learning how to use this editor since i was told that this was the "hacker's editor".

So what is so nice about emacs?

Answer 1

I've been casual Emacs (GNU) user for many years. Never become super proficient but it is definitely my choice for Notepad-like app. Works flawlessly on all platforms (*nix, Win, Mac), works in a console and as UI. Learning curve is a little steep but it totally worth it. Eclipse (which is IDE I'm most frequently using) supports Emacs-like editing mode. Search-replace is mad and very convenient. Now - if you are a hacker - Emacs is just heavenly. There's always a plugin for practically anything and there are many-many people who don't use anything else. And then there's LISP. So - I say do it! It's no doubt very valuable skill to have

Answer 2

The fact that once you've been using it for a while, you can do pretty well anything you'd like to do with just a few keystrokes.

The fact that it's probably the most configurable bit of software on the planet.

The fact that it's been around for ~30 years, so there are an awful lot of useful tools built for it (major modes, handy little functions etc).

Answer 3

Emacs takes GDB to the next level.. No other software integrates as well with GDB....

It's super configurable (for example, when I press F5 my emacs parses my Makefile, figures out what executable it creates, splits the window and runs gdb against it)...

Answer 4

The ability to record and playback edits, macros, is my favorite feature. I haven't seen another editor that supports this as well, so I find myself switching back to emacs regularly even when I'm working in Eclipse, etc.

The coolness comes from the fact that every keyboard shortcut, every menu item, every ad-hoc expression/function evaluation is recorded. Throw in navigation at the syntax level (e.g. "forward one expression"), and recorded macros wind up being able to deal with a wide variety of variation of input data.

Then you can save the recorded macro to your config file with a name so that you'll always have it.

Honorable mention to (a) registers for having a copy/paste buffer for each key, and (b) much easier to extend than other editors once you grok some elisp.