> It’s clear to me that there’s something magical in it, but I can’t seem to tap that magic for myself.
I love Emacs for some of its really nice features that I just cannot find anywhere else (and no Elisp knowledge is required). I'm not one for tech monocultures and try to diversify my tooling as much as I can, but Emacs is seriously good when it comes to so many things:
- Magit in Emacs is arguably the best Git interface in the planet. You can run simple operations and complex workflows with just a few keypresses.
- Note-taking with org-roam (https://www.orgroam.com/). This is the best Free note-taking system that I know of — it's like Roam Research, where you can have your own zettlekasten with backlinks etc. and it scales really well with a very large number of notes (it uses a SQLite database in the background). Notes, articles with images, I use this for so many things every day.
- Encrypted notes. Emacs handles encryption elegantly out of the box. You can encrypt entire documents transparently (by adding a .gpg extension, for instance) using symmetric or asymmetric encryption, and Emacs will get your keys from gpg all automatically. You can also encrypt small sections inside a larger document.
- Spreadsheets. I do all my personal spreadsheets in Emacs' Org Mode. It never ceases to amaze me how text formats can be so powerful. Works even on my oldest computer running Emacs from a decade ago.
- Emacs Calculator. This is like a mini-WolframAlpha inside Emacs. I can solve equations, perform operations on dates, convert units, track returns on investments, simple and compound interest, the list goes on. And it integrates really well with the rest of Emacs as well.
- Org Mode. This is possibly the best designed markup language. I take all my notes in this. You can have inline images, spreadsheets, code blocks with inline execution etc. Its support for literate programming is really awesome: it's like Jupyter Notebooks but for any language. (Emacs' Markdown support is really awesome and powerful, as well, with its previews and table handling etc)
- Gorgeous typography. I run Emacs as a GUI app at all times, and it renders all my typography (proportional or monospaced) gorgeously which makes it a delight to look at and use (Ideal Sans + Verlag for notes (org, markdown, reST etc), Cascadia Code for coding with programming ligatures enabled). This is all in the raw text, not just in the preview like other editors.
- Powerful macro support.
A few other miscellaneous things that come to mind:
- Powerful window management. I can split panes vertically, horizontally, and undo and redo my window layout, all out of the box. This makes working with multiple files a breeze, especially when you have to look at some of them at the same time, and/or move to different layouts on the fly.
- Navigation and text-editing at a higher level of abstraction. With Emacs, I can navigate not just in the normal ways (by lines, characters, words etc.), but in various other context-dependent ways: e.g. Emacs understands sentences, functions etc. and I can navigate, delete, select, and manipulate text at a much higher level, allowing me to work with Emacs in ways that traditional editors cannot match.
- Calendar. I use this for various things, like quickly finding out when sunset is. It can also tell you phases of the moon etc. if you need that, all out of the box.
- Email using mu4e. Emacs can work as a beautiful mail client. I used to use this several years ago with mbsync (isync). It's surprising how offline email can let you search through all your emails literally instantly.
And there's so much more depending on what you're looking for :)
Emacs is like this retro piece of software that is paradoxically highly modern at the same time and actually better than the status quo. (It's snowing outside now. Let me go ahead and run M-x fireplace in my Emacs ;)