A huge amount is taking preweitten plugins—someone upthread said you should just learn your editor’s existing feature set, and this is true.

But I use Emacs as a mail client—message mode is awesome—and extended it with a procedure to create text/html parts and all the necessary MIME headers. I especially like using that for tables that are readable in monospaces text/plain or as HTML tables. Compare that to a GUI mail editor, which surely defaults to HTML but which probably isn’t going to offer you tabular support.

Let’s see. I have some fine control over white space in here, to meet different collaborator’s guidelines. And that integrates with the magit git front end.

I have a bunch of macros driven by the abbrev autocorrect scheme.

But in reflecting on this, the big important category is “Other”. I write 5-50 line programs, sometimes starting from a macro recording of one run of the core loop, weekly.

Imagine a world where general spreadsheets didn’t exist; you had accounting software but it was all like TurboTax or quickbooks, very hard wired for a purpose. And imagine asking how users of Excel customized their workflows, as they tried to explain that the point was the total flexibility. Emacs is like that for text files.

I'm currently working on an extension to modify the built-in symbolic calculator to display its stack entries in rendered LaTeX--it already has various language modes for displaying its s-expression based formulas, including LaTeX, so this honestly isn't that big of a lift.