GNU Emacs

Emacs is not just a text editor or an IDE, it's a whole text based operating system. Emacs is what I hoped command shells would be before I started to learn them. The learning curve is nightmarish, but it's worth it.

Could be the world's first super app.

Was the hackable editor long before Atom and VSCode came to be. Pretty lightweight too.

Many say it's learning curve is pretty steep but nowadays it is pretty easy to get started with thanks to starter kits like Doom Emacs.

You can simply make your own config too, pretty easy to do thanks to thousands of community-made packages and third party documentation (e.g. EmacsWiki)

Emacs is built around being a Elisp interpreter with a text editor. You can do a lot with it, and has amazing packages and distributions for a lot of different use-cases.

The most problematic things with GNU Emacs are performance, bugs, and package integration. Emacs is an ancient piece of software, i.e. no multi-threading, and elisp is not that performant either. There are some hope for better performance with Gccemacs (i'm actively using it) which natively compiles elisp, noticeable making Emacs snappier mainly with GUI elements. Still, as of November 2020, it has a lot of bugs, is unstable, and it doesn't solve performance issues for a good enough experience. When using a lot of packages, and the fact i'm using unstable pgtk-native-comp, it crashes a lot. And the packages integration thing is that packages are built by users and may not be made with performance in mind, and can conflict with other packages etc so you have to tweak them. Also Emacs packages are a nightmare security risk btw.

[Edited by Lunatica, November 20]

It would be more appropriate to compare Emacs to an operating system than to a text editor, and I mean that in a good way. Once you manage to grok Emacs, you'll seldom want to be anywhere else.

After two decades of using vi simply because it was there, I decided to take the plunge and try Emacs. I find interface is nicer, and after a few hours of tweaking settings I've found a configuration that looks good and functions well on Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD.

I really like that Emacs comes with a bunch of utilities built in, such as the wonderful Org mode.

On Windows, Emacs has replaced Evernote and OneNote for note taking (with org mode) and Notepad++ and EditPad Pro for text editing.

A simply wonderful old-school productivity tool. Thank-you Richard Stallman and Guy Steele, Jr.

There's no limits for Emacs. You really should try, if you can! ;)