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> if you believe in the Unix philosophy then you have to admit that Emacs is simply bloated and trying to do too much and therefore is not really the best at anything

On the contrary, Emacs tries to do just one thing: provide an Elisp runtime for other applications. It does this fairly well.

Do not confuse Elisp applications like evil, org, calc, magit, etc. with Emacs itself!

Yep. If you see Emacs as a text editor with lots of features, then it's doing lots of things. But, if you see Emacs as a platform that comes bundled with some apps by default, then its "one thing" is to be a text-oriented app platform.

The whole "do one thing" slogan is kind of vacuous anyway; e.g., what if my "one thing" is "implement all WWW standards to be able to use any web page"? Is that still "one thing"? If not, then wouldn't implementing only "one" part of WWW be useless?

Emacs is a lisp refugee in Unixland. It does not follow the Unix philosophy, it follows the Lisp philosophy. But it integrates.

-- Source unknown (to me)

> Again, if you believe in the Unix philosophy then you have to admit that Emacs is simply bloated and trying to do too much and therefore is not really the best at anything.

If.

> I will admit that I'm not a fan of org mode and find it to be oversold and another time waster for people who are already wasting time configuring their editors. I personally use vimwiki, there is a vim plugin for org mode.

I actually use emacs solely for org-mode. I find editing single files and even larger projects to be more of a pain that it is worth, so I just use my custom vim to do that.

What keeps me with org mode and emacs is mostly bibliography management. I have emacs set up to read my Zotero directory, and with a keybinding I can insert a reference to a book or magazine or the such. Now, what is really great about this is that when I export the org file (usually to latex->pdf, but also occasionaly to HTML), it exports the references in the style that they need to be in (MLA, APA, Turabian, etc.) and creates a bibliography page at the end of the export with everything that I referenced.

I can also add notes to any references using org-roam, so that I have have annotated bibliographies quite easily.

If I could have something else that does just this, I would drop emacs in a heartbeat. But until I do find that, emacs and org-mode it is.

Same. I have try many outliners to irrationally avoid emacs but they all suck compared to org-mode.

How do you surf the web in vim?

How do you read email, RSS news, and usenet with vim?

Does vim have a chat client as powerful as ERC?

Mainly, though, is vim programmed in and extended through a lisp, and does it have an entire lisp ecosystem built around it?

Don't get me wrong, I love vim, and used it and vi for 25 years before switching to emacs. But my emacs can do far, far more than vim ever did... and there's no way I'll be switching back until it has all the above and more.

seems weird to me that one would want to do any of these things inside vim... though it should be possible with the right plugins... but why? just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task.

It's because of the tight integration with the rest of the editor and all the rest of the packages that I use.

For example, when I go to edit an email I don't have to start up an external editor, so there is no context switching. Also, as emacs is super powerful, the editor that I use to edit my emails is super powerful, unlike the editors in most other mail clients.

Copying and pasting or importing/exporting between the various packages and other emacs buffers that I use is also seamless unlike anything that you do between conventional, separate applications. Everywhere that I go within emacs and everything that I do has the full power of emacs to do it with. I have macros, snippets, and elisp (to name just a few) at my fingertips.

Another advantage is that all these packages that I use (email, my git interface, RSS reader, etc) are all written in elisp and are integrated using elisp, so if you know elisp (which I do) it's easy to modify them to your liking, and have them do exactly what you want. This makes the whole experience super customizable to an extent unmatched pretty much anywhere else.

Without such integration and customizability, virtually all other software that I've used seems primitive and rigid by comparison.

So, yeah, it makes a big difference.

> seems weird to me that one would want to do any of these things inside vim... though it should be possible with the right plugins... but why? just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task.

Imagine you put tons of information in vimwiki from your browser.

It's not a far stretch to wish you had a text browser inside of vim to more easily get important information into vim wiki.

At some point the browser could even begin to feel like a hindrance to curating and improving upon your higher quality vimwiki notes.

Emacs is like this, but not just for notes... for pretty much everything.

> just use a window manager like screen or tmux to multi-task.

I'm quite used to my auto-completion and snippets in emacs. As well as my clipboard history. The flexibility of isearch and how intuitive it's UX is.

If I leave emacs I never have all of those familiar things that fit like a glove. I'm in a different world with different rules that is far less malleable, understandable, and introspectable as emacs.

Hopefully that helps make sense of things a bit =)

I think this sort of defense of EMacs misses a key point: most people have no interest in running a browser, email, chat, etc. from within their text editor.

Generally people prefer to do those sorts of things with specialized applications that are more tailored towards those individual use cases.

Alas, living in emacs can't be appreciated until you get good at emacs. More than the "one-stop-shop" aspect of it, there's the "everything is a buffer of manipulable text" aspect which, again, can't be appreciated until you make the leap of faith.

> Never had a problem or thought about manipulating directories inside of Vim.

It's extremely useful though, I find myself using the fact I can treat my directory list as a text file quite often.