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Emacs - although there's a lot of accumulated cruft in the form of whacky APIs and elisp functions, the design of Emacs is stunningly effective. The way that minor modes and keymaps are composed to customize the interaction mode for each individual buffer is clever and beautiful, to name just one thing out of many. And, as janky as elisp is, it's one of the few extension languages that's actually good at its job, and the Emacs elisp API allows you complete freedom over virtually every aspect of the editor. Unironically, Emacs is not a text editor - it's a toolkit for creating text-oriented applications.

Forth, Lisp (Scheme, in particular - I love CL but it's the C++ of Lisps), and Lua - three languages that take a small set of elegant primitives and synthesize them to give you incredible power.

Remember the Milk is a task-tracking SaaS that is one of the few pieces of software that I actually like, which is especially impressive given that it's proprietary. Cheap, fast, effective, and with a UI design that continually impresses me with its mix of intuitiveness and ergonomics.



I use emacs, but would love to see a from scratch modern rebuild which deals with rough edges like threading and performance.


Emacs 28.1 [0], recently released, has support for native compilation [1], which greatly speeds up some workflows.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/emacs/news/NEWS.2...

[1] https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/speed-up-emacs-libjan...


Emacs is quite popular and has some of the most skilled programmers I know using it. I'm really surprised that there hasn't been a neovim-equivalent project for emacs. Or maybe it's out there and I just don't know about it?


Spacemacs had some Neovim-like fame at some point. I don't see it promoted that much anymore.


And to be clear, I don’t know of many 40 year old projects without warts, emacs has done incredibly well


Oh, I completely agree! Emacs is only elegant along some axes, and those two are particular pain points for me, too.


> it's a toolkit for creating text-oriented applications

Good examples IMO are Magit and Org-mode. They are basically large applications created in Emacs, and each so good that they are worth learning/using Emacs just for using them (I'd say AucTeX is also in this category).


Writing Scheme (Guile Scheme on Guix) has been the only time I've actually felt a "eureka moment" and feeling like I understood fully what my code was doing.




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