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emacs may probably let you do this too, and better. The big problem is: You need to know emacs beforehand, which is seriously a lot, and likely bizarre to any modern person. I do, and I will likely never give it up, but I've been at it since the 90s.

In my mind, emacs suffers the same problem as TeX/LaTeX. Some parts of it are very antiquated and just don't fit into the modern world anymore. They'd need an overhaul.

But, that overhaul is hard to impossible to do without losing compatibility. And that compatibility is why you simply cannot replace emacs or LaTeX: There is many decades of features, packages, and whole ecosystems in there. Throwing that away would be a giant loss, people will always continue using it. Other editors can't catch up. Maybe if they survive for ~50 years, too?

Just to drive home how old emacs is: At one point, the popular joke was that emacs stands for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping". Yep, 8MB large software was so bloated that it was funny and debilitating.




They (whoever they are) would be well-served to move to emacs, and stay there forever. I don't know which "antiquated" thing you're referring to, specifically, but it all works quite well. Both back in the day and today.


How often do you have emacs hanging because TRAMP is completing some network operation, for example? I’m a big emacs fan, have been using it since the 90s, and will likely never move away. But there’s no reason to pretend that it doesn’t have warts.


Then the joke evolved to that it couldn't open files 8MB or larger without hanging, at one point.


Yeah. I did feel the original joke, though. There's a reason why emacs had this weird "unexec" bootstrap during building that would run emacs, compile all its lisp, and just dump all its memory back onto disk to be the actual executable.

My first Linux PC had 8MB RAM, long long after emacs became a thing. If emacs' resident set came even close to half of that or so, "constantly swapping" would have been reality.




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