- Emacs is Free Software.
- My hands stay put in their touch typing positions. Always.
- Emacs is its own Lisp interpreter, allowing its behaviour to dynamically morph in weird and wondrous ways.
- It is aware of and intelligent about what’s in my files; transforming its behaviour to always do the “right thing.”
- There’s no need to quit the program to do other useful things.
- Emacs allows me to work text in very powerful ways, such as searching-through and replacing regular expressions.
- It affords seamless editing of remote files.
- From checking e-mail to performing matrix calculations to organising my to-do lists, Emacs presents itself in a multitude of delicious not-necessarily plain-text-edity flavours; continuing to do the “right thing.” And to top that off, it’s extensible!
- While most text editors are content with checking for spelling errors, Emacs also checks my programs’ syntax on the fly. And this isn’t just for “real programming,” it’s for LaTeX and HTML too.
Almost every aspect of this journal is lovingly crafted in GNU Emacs.