Consistency

Along the lines of the August Emacs Carnival, I thought I'd get my notes down on why I personally decided to put effort into learning Emacs. Probably unsurprisingly, I didn't start with this editor. My first text editor was Visual Studio (not Code), followed by a sequence (in a now forgotten order) of Notepad++, Visual Studio Code, Kate, and Neovim. I picked up Emacs around my first year of University (it may have been a bit before that actually), but my usage for a long time was limited just to simple text editing. I didn't start from any distribution, and I rarely touched .emacs unless I wanted some syntax highlighting. I also swapped between other editors when I needed to - I would use Code at work, the built-in editor in Godot, even Notepad for taking notes when something else wasn't available.

There was a point where I realised that swapping between tools was introducing some unnecessary mental overhead (I think it was being forced to use some web text editor within AWS, I don't remember). Unbeknown to me, Emacs was the perfect solution. Not just for text, but for everything I could want. I came to value the consistency of my user interface, and not just for text which was my immediate issue, but also for other applications like Git and note-taking (via org). I don't really evangelise tools, because people will use what they're used to, but if I had to pitch Emacs to someone it would really just be "a consistent interface for almost everything, on any platform".

It's difficult to overstate how useful this one trait of the application is. Being able to keep the same interface and functionality (more or less) whether I'm on my home Linux systems, or my work machines which have been a mix of Windows and Mac is such a boon. I can have an entire development environment functioning on a client device usually with just 1 software approval, as opposed 30 different approvals for an editor, a git interface, etc.

Emacs is a piece of software with a "killer feature" around every corner, but consistency and portability is without question the one that I believe stands before the rest. Even org.