Just Few days ago I was watching a Youtuber talking about his experience using Emacs, while a couple of years ago he tried it and leave it because he wasn’t completely enjoying the experience in the editor given that he was a heavy Vim user, this time he could grasp the Emacs ethos. And now, he became a happy user.

There is something in his shared experience that is quite interesting to notice, and that is he still believes that Vim is superior text editor overall, and cannot deny the fact that he loves more that other editor while he prefer to use Emacs in this current time, giving how pleasant his computing experience has become.

Part of me really understand his opinion, I was also a while ago a heavy UNIX/terminal/Vim user, I considered that the tools in the terminal were much better than any replacement with GUI, efficiency and the vim-like keybindings where a mandatory request of any app I was using, and I was moving more to something like the Suckless philosophy of software, so things like Cmus, Newsboat, Mutt, Zathura and other apps where essential to my computing experience.

While I would argue that Vim and all these Unix tools are incredibly good, something that I always feel Emacs does better, is that the computing experience is smoother and consistent. This reminds me of something that I learned in undergraduate school about factory and other productive organizations in general, when the system tries to find the optimal way of operating in every component of the chain, you will find important inefficiencies in the general performance of that system: Huge inventory, long breakdowns giving the presence of bottlenecks, etc. This is overall something not desired and that’s why our main concerns must be to achieve a systemic perspective about the organization and get overall an efficient system that while has not the most efficient processes, It can easily connect with the other ones in harmony to achieve the goal using the least resources as possible in general.

In my personal opinion Emacs try to achieve something similar, It is not the fastest or efficient tool, neither has necessarily the most elegant keybindings, it doesn’t have the best tools for all the apps or the most impressive UI, but you can extend it in such a way that overall your computing experience will has less friction than a terminal with several sessions of different apps being developed by people with different visions in mind. In fact, I would say that Emacs allows you to unify all this different components that were not considered to work together into one consistent text abstraction system with a high level programming language (Elisp). Emacs is that extra layer that brings an efficient and smoothly computing experience.