(06-09-2018, 07:44 PM)jkl Wrote: However, what is it that you need in a text (or code) editor? Even GNU Emacs works rather well without any configuration changes. (If you can live with its defaults. But I don't like the colors...)

Stallman explains it quite well (source:

Quote:EMACS could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. Neither I nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until I had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. EMACS exists because I felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight.

what Emacs is couldn't have came into being, it's a core aspect of Emacs (source):

Quote:By Stallman's own recollection, the macro hack touched off an explosion of further innovation. "Everybody and his brother was writing his own collection of redefined screen-editor commands, a command for everything he typically liked to do," Stallman would later recall. "People would pass them around and improve them, making them more powerful and more general. The collections of redefinitions gradually became system programs in their own right."

Of course the standard configuration works well, but depending on my use case, I might want things to be different or to do entirely new things, either because of my own intentions or my personal environment. Examples would be something as simple as rebinding M-SPC from to or using input modes to easily write german words anywhere I use Emacs.

In the end, it's just a very, very big shell.