One of the pivotal moments in my career has been when I used Emacs just enough to truly understand what "Emacs is an operating system" means, not just as a joke but as something I could believe in
But you already had an operating system and you could already code... Did Emacs really give YOU any capability you didn't have before? Don't forget this is a text editor, not an IDE or some general purpose automation harness You could add lisp to mspaint and mspaint suddenly becomes awesome somehow? I don't follow the logic
Admittedly, it doesn't help that there are some sibling comments that implicitly seem to be speaking that way.
However, Emacs is a 42-year-old software program that has been in constant development this entire time. Its git repository has over 180,000 commits right now on its main branch, which is still 20,000 ahead of VSCode. It doesn't just have a Lisp editor attached, it has 1.6 million lines of Lisp in it as well, and that's just the source repo, not all of the extensions you can get for it. Using "cloc" to count the total lines of source it has, it's still pretty close to 2/3rds the lines of code than VSCode has, at 2,613,748 for emacs versus 3,849,521 for VSCode. So that's the scale we're talking here, something on par with an IDE, not something on par with a simple text editor.
Yes, it gives you a lot of capabilities you didn't have before. The joke about it being a decent OS that needs a good text editor comes from the fact it has a large number of things it can do out of the box that aren't just text editing. It isn't just Notepad with a Lisp interpreter attached. It has vast capabilities that have been implemented and then also tested over the course of decades. Considering the set of disadvantages it carries with it, like weird key bindings and the fact that the variant of lisp it uses is more-or-less unique to emacs, somewhat analogously to the handicap principle [1] one should counterintuitively understand that as a sign that it must have extraordinary strengths that are able to offset that.
(I've used it for a long time, but I never really learned Lisp. AIs are making it much easier to customize than ever, though. I've said many times here on HN that I think every line of AI code should be reviewed. So yesterday I prompted Claude to build some Lisp functions so I can declare 1. a base directory 2. a regex of file names to match and produce 3. a function to walk over the entire directory forwards or backwards with CTRL-x CTRL-n or CTRL-x CTRL-p, thus allowing me to easily walk through an entire project for review purposes systematically. Nobody had to give me permission to do that. I didn't need to "create an extension". I don't have to care if anyone else in the world wants it. It's not the only editor that can do this as easily as emacs but it's a short list.)