The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy
I&#x27;m in a similar boat as in the first quote: Have used emacs for decades, glad that I do, can&#x27;t imagine switching... don&#x27;t think I would recommend it to anyone new, unless they are <i>really</i> open about learning something entirely different.<p>Emacs seems to be in the same position as LaTeX: Outdated paradigms that would probably need an entire redesign from the ground up to start &quot;making sense&quot; in the modern world. This starts with (nowadays) non-conformant shortcuts, includes window&#x2F;buffer management (the terminology alone is archaic: panes are windows and windows are frames), and ends with elisp, which even Lisp programmers themselves rebuke.<p>But such a do-over is impossible in both LaTeX and emacs, since that would also mean throwing all the thousands (ten thousands?) packages--and lots of core functionality--away. Stuff that has accumulated for many decades and that is the reason why we&#x27;re sticking with it: Everything else feels very limited in comparison.<p>And it&#x27;s not just the &quot;big&quot; things. When I want to sort a few lines in a region and immediately discover that I can just call &quot;sort-lines&quot;, because of course I can, I know that I&#x27;m not going to bother waiting for some other editor to catch up in all those little things.<p>Admittedly, I haven&#x27;t tried modern distributions like spacemacs and DOOM Emacs, but it&#x27;s a bit hard for me to imagine that you won&#x27;t need to come face to face with &quot;emacsism&quot; at some time.