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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

The best tool is the one that makes completing tasks better: faster, easier, cheaper, or superior.

It takes significant usage and training to overcome the overhead that Emacs imposes. There are other tools that are fast, free, and capable which do not have this problem.

Even tools which are reasonably extensible. Like VSCode. There's good reason that all the new agentic development environments aren't forks of Emacs or NeoVim.

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> There are other tools that are fast, free, and capable which do not have this problem.

You are merely mirroring what I said.

> There's good reason that all the new agentic development environments aren't forks of Emacs or NeoVim.

And there's nothing wrong with the fact that Emacs will never be the tool people fork for agentic (or IDE, or for any other purpose). That's not a mark against Emacs.

Emacs isn't the best code editor. It isn't the best note taker. It isn't the best document writer. It isn't even a good lisp.

What is Emacs the best at these days?

Why are you asking the person who said Emacs isn't the best at any particular thing?

If you want to engage, at least read the comments.

Because it's the question that I'm interested in. I use Emacs still because it's astoundingly mediocre at all things that I use it for; but always mediocre and never terrible. I would like to know if there's something it's the best at, besides being predictably mediocre.

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