I have yet to find a reason to switch away from emacs as my primary work flow editor. I've been using it for at least 30 years now.

Why do I prefer it to (say) Turbo Pascal or Borland C++? Both of whom "Visual Studio" style environments have inherited a lot from? Well, those two worked well when one didn't have multiple consoles or terminals, and on a single tasking OS (DOS).

I do not want or need my editor to be my whole UI. (I know Emacs can do it, it's just not something I either want or need). And I am not comfortable with a UI that demands changes from Emacs in order to function, as any such UI suffers from blocking effective development, especially for (say) embedded code spaces.

Can there be better than Emacs? Yeah, probably. It's certainly not the most intuitive interface, for instance.

Is there?

No.

Good opportunity for us Emacs users to proselytize: send an intro video to a few people who don't use Emacs but should :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJZDmO5yOxE

My biggest regret in life was that I was introduced to vim before emacs and got really comfortable with it.

Did not realize that everything I was building in my vim configs to make it better was already default in emacs i.e dired, compile mode, magit, org mode, etc.

If I wasn't able to multiplex with tmux I would have switched to emacs a long time ago.

I love emacs and have been using it daily for about 5 years now.

Many people have mentioned magit and org mode. I just want to give another shout out to consult.el which is a wonderful way to grep and search through text.

Happy birthday emacs!

I was very fortunate: Yale CS already used emacs in 1981, and offered local high school students the chance to take their classes. By the time I got to MIT a year later, I didn't know that there were any other serious editors available!

I got a nice case of emacs pinky back in my early 30's. Had to take disability, get physical therapy to rehabilitate, etc. Been vi all the way since then.

Thinking someone has made the wrong editor choice is a great example of feeling strongly about something that’s meaningless and likely uninformed.

Find it useful to conjure up cognitive dissonance and practice letting it go.

TFA begins before GNU Emacs proper, but, still: does age and portability make Elisp the ultimate write-one-run-everywhere language?

Been using an Org file containing all my projects as the tracker for each, with a little custom tool that wraps emacsclient as the driver which my agents use. It's been pretty great, but the single-thread bites as it can get wedged sometimes and then I have to go hit C-g.

I quit being an emacs tourist about 5 years ago, this year I started rewriting my init.el with use-package and the popular packages (vertico, eglot, etc). My config is still a mess and there’s always something new I want to do. Sometimes I think about trying neovim or trying some editor that I wouldn’t have to config stuff that much, but I think I’d want to customize things a certain anyway.

For LLM stuff I’ve been using eca, or claude code in a vterm or ghostel. I’m still experimenting with this stuff but I don’t think emacs is getting in my way. Not sure if I’d recommend to everyone, though.