Why I use Emacs

In the year 2026, it might seem surprising someone would still use Emacs in 2026. Why would anyone torture themselves to learn all the keybinds and configure Emacs when easier editors like VS Code exist?

Well, there are actually a lot of reasons why!

Emacs is not an editor, that's a common misconception. It actually it is a Lisp interpreter, specifically an interpreter for Lisp-2.

Everything you see in Emacs, even the editor itself, are written in Emacs Lisp.

This means you can very easily extend Emacs. Just open it, switch to the scratch buffer, write some Lisp S-expressions and execute them with C-x C-e at the end of them!

I recommend you look into what S-expressions are, if you want to extend Emacs.

Emacs is self-documenting! You can do C-h ? to find documentation for everything, and I mean EVERYTHING about Emacs.

You can also launch M-x eww, which is a text-based browser perfect for reading documentations or articles.

This post itself was written using Org mode! Org mode is one of the killer features of Emacs. You could think of it like markdown but even more powerful! It allows literate programming, TODOs, notes, and everything a document can do!

Emacs runs anywhere! Here's some of the ports I know:

• Linux
• macOS
• Windows
• Android
• BSD
• Haiku
• Solaris

…and it can probably be ported anywhere that can run C!

You should switch to Emacs!