Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

To me the charming thing about Emacs is how introspective a program it is. This goes beyond all the documentation being built-in, and being able to redefine things on the fly. For instance, it's easy to define a keybinding that does "Take me to the source code of the command that's bound to the next keybinding I type". When you use that and land at a destination, it will probably be Elisp code, but in some cases will even be C code - it works either way.

I have never once thought Visual Studio needs some way to edit its own source code on the fly... whats the actual use case?

Yeah, before Emacs, it never occurred to me to even think of trying to control my browser from my editor.

I never thought that I can type just about any text, not in the input box of some app, but in my editor - with Emacs, if I need to type anything longer that three words - in Slack app, Zoom chat, browser window, etc., I'll do it in my editor, why have I never thought about this before?

Emacs has no business of taking screenshots, yet I use it to do just that - I'd insert a screenshot while taking notes, OCRing the text out of image when desired.

Before Emacs, I never thought of playing and controlling videos from my editor or driving my WM from it - I simply never thought how advantageous could that even be.

I can't really use anything else without feeling constrained specifically because [mostly] nothing else allows me to type some Lisp in just about any buffer, evaluate it in place and immediately affect not only my editor but any computational aspect on a local or remote machine.

In essence, Emacs is a mindset. Non-Emacs folk often don't see the "actual use cases" because their minds operate on a different plane. And for some, once they crack open that door of possibilities, there's really no turning back.

> Non-Emacs folk often don't see the "actual use cases" because their minds operate on a different plane.

youve just listed a bunch of scripts launched from emacs. with your logic, you can take the lisp interpreter out of emacs, stick it into say mspaint, and have an equally powerful program.