This decade's Emacs appreciation post

It’s been about 14 years since I wrote in praise of Emacs - I still use it daily and it looks likely to be my editor for a long time to come. This post is to make a more easily found home for a Mastodon post and reply thread I recently wrote about Emacs:

The original post:

On an excellent Talk Python episode on key management, glyph gave a brilliant reflection on why he still uses emacs and I realised the same reason is mainly why I still use it after 20+ years: Nothing else facilitates, emphasises and just plain groks text editing the way emacs does (except probably vim). Other tools are better IDEs, have better integrations, offer better auto-completion and etc but emacs is so good at writing and editing text I find other tools too frustrating to use.

In reply to very helpful suggestions of emacs bindings in VS Code:

I’ve tried hard to use vscode with the key binding extensions, I can see what I’m missing. Unfortunately:

• I had to use the mouse too much (ie at all);
• decades of muscle memory demanded keys and chords that just weren’t there
• I’ve grown to depend on paradigms invented before I was born such as text region manipulation in ways vscode doesn’t consider.

Finishing the posts with a smidgeon of self-awareness:

I fully realise this is a list of the personal idiosyncrasies of a curmudgeonly greybeard developer.