I like it obviously otherwise I wouldn’t still be using it, but it will never exactly feel elegant to me. More like a good text editor and a hundred other tools all duct taped together.
and that's the fascinating thing about it. What the OP called a 'living program' Smalltalk people called 'human-computer symbiosis'. Software as a fully transparent, introspective, organic thing you can directly interact with and change even as it runs.
There's actually very few software like it, and if anything philosophically more and more software tends towards the static unix "one tool one job" mantra.
However, I draw the line at "text editor" with Emacs. I have no desire to read my email, paint pictures, or compose music inside Emacs—there are better tools for that.
A few years ago I got fed up with not being able to configure Mail.app to notify me of responses to "watched" threads but nothing else and thought "...I bet the CLI tools would make this achievable."
So, I moved to mbsync for fetching email, not much for indexing the local email directory, and notmuch-mode / Emacs for reading and writing email.
It's head and shoulders above any other email setup I've ever used.
I wish I'd done it years ago.
In fact, my config these days is basically vanilla emacs with some of the UI stripped away, the modus theme, and a few language-specific modes for syntax highlighting. I don't use evil or hydra or any such thing any more. The only thing I have a sticking point with is exec-path-from-shell messing with $PATH in my env because of how it works.
I guess the reason it works well for me is because I try not to write code, so I don't need a massive toolkit that helps me write code as efficiently as possible. No-code is bug-free code, maximise the work not done, etc.
That's ironic.
In emacs I can overwrite ANY function wherever it is from my config and change for example how shr (an html renderer) handles/styles headings. Its crazy!
One MAJOR thing that emacs does better is making things work together. I have orderless installed for matching strings in ANY completion. It works everywhere while in VSCode you cant even get close to that.
VSCode is great if you like the default and dont want to „build your text editor“ cause thats what emacs basically is. Its a toolbox with which you can build the editor to fit your exact needs with almost no limitations
At the end of the day, it was a very nice text editor with a development environment embedded in it and the ability to tweak things to my work flows was certainly interesting. However, I never enjoyed the seemingly unintuitive default key bindings and I often found myself disappearing into rabbit holes and tweaking stuff just to make everything work more smoothly. Ultimately, I decided that was time I should have been spending on more productive pursuits.
To this day though, I don't regret giving emacs a spin and I still swap caps lock and ctrl on all my systems. Remapping that key binding is helpful for so many things outside of emacs.