What really sold Emacs are two things:
- Resilience
- Extensibility
If I am going to invest my time into something, I want it to last for at least my life time, I don't want to be in a situation where I invest a lot of time into learning a tool and a few years later it is deprecated and I have to switch to something else.
We have seen this happen recently with Atom, which was often touted as the Emacs successor has been sunset-ted. I can inductively assume that Emacs will not die in the next 5 years by looking its (GNU Emacs) 40 something years, it almost feels like a miracle that this thing is still going strong!
Some of you might feel that Vi also satisfies this condition as it's just as if not more older than Emacs (they were released in the same year 1976). If you are reading this article carefully you might have noticed an inconsistency, I say Emacs is 40 years old but 1976 is 48 years in the past. Yes, because Vi is not used today, but GNU Emacs is still used today, in fact Vim is being replaced by Neovim as more and more people seem to switch to it, so my point about a continuous system is not true for Vi/Vim/Neovim.
I feel the reason for this is the fact that Emacs is very extensible. It by design more extensible than Neovim because it is implemented as a Emacs lisp interpreter, and most of the functionality is implement in Emacs lisp, this means that practically every feature can be implemented in Emacs! So there is no reason for me to use any other text editor when this can do everything! And I have found this to be practically true, here is an example😉.
So this, friends, is why I have become a saint in the Church of Emacs
(well, I technically still use some non-free software, I said that for
comedic effect).