Eight Reasons Why Emacs is Better Than Your Current Text Editor
If you’re reading this article, chances are you regularly use Notepad, Visual Studio, or Sublime to write code and edit text. Here’s why you should use Emacs instead.
Emacs is a command line text editor that you can use to accomplish practically any development-related task. If you’re not already familiar with command line editors, they are programs that run entirely within a terminal window. They share much of the same functionality as traditional text editors and IDEs, but offer significant portability and customization benefits that other editors do not.
There are many other command line editors, such as Vim or Nano, and many of the benefits of Emacs outlined in this article likely apply to other command line editors as well. However, I also detail many Emacs-specific features that I feel make it the top choice.
Calling Emacs a text editor is a little like calling your iPhone a telephone. Making calls might be a primary intended function, but that’s by no means all it’s designed to do. In the same way with Emacs, editing text is certainly its primary function, but a whole host of other features mean that you hardly ever need to leave Emacs while developing. Below I’ll outline what I love about using Emacs and why I think you’ll love it too.
