Emacs: The most successful malleable system
I&#x27;ve been a long time Emacs user since ~1997 until ~2011, when I started developing mostly with ruby on rails on a mac, discovered TextMate and falled in love with it, with its slick UI, freshness (at the time) of ideas, ease of use, despite its obsession with mac based stuff, like the use of Finder for project navigation.<p>After a few years I discovered Sublime Text, with its tons of extensions and exceptional speed, bought a subscription and learned as much of it as possible, ditching TextMate.<p>Then I switched to Atom, mostly for the discoverability and the speed (back then) of development (and, frankly, for the hype). The only problem with Sublime Text, at least at the time, was the slow development process: new builds were few and far between.<p>I tried VS Code too soon, and wasn&#x27;t impressed by how the navigation between buffers used to work (it has changed since then, I think).<p>A few years ago I did a serious attempt at learning Vim for good, but in the end I gave up, and I&#x27;ve come back to Emacs, this time to stay, unless something radically new is introduced.<p>The good thing is that I can usually tell my coworkers about features of the editors they use that they don&#x27;t know, because I&#x27;ve used them a lot.<p>The only feature I miss from all other editors is the incredible speed of Sublime Text: to this day, if I ever have to edit an SQL dump (which I hope I will never ever have to do again), I&#x27;m surely reaching for Sublime Text, no other editor can AFAIK open a 200+MB file without freezing and&#x2F;or crashing.<p>The odd thing about Emacs is that its vastly superior customizability (or malleabilty, as the article says) tend to be a trap, for one can spend hours, and days, getting lost in its huge universe and falling into rabbit hole after rabbit hole instead of actually getting stuff done, but I&#x27;ve not yet decided if that&#x27;s a bad thing or a good one.