Re: GNU Emacs raison d'etre

[Karl Fogel]

On 14 May 2020, H. Dieter Wilhelm wrote:
>> To the best of my knowledge, no other editing environment rewards
>> sustained user investment so well.  ...
>
>What you are saying is really very well put and I support your opinion
>but...
>
>> So I suggest that GNU Emacs's raison d'être is to be the text editor
>> that best rewards sustained user investment.
>
>Forgive me if I think above sentence should be a bit reformulated
>because GNU Emacs is and must be more than a text editor (as text editor
>I would choose Vim).

Yes, agreed.  My choice of terminology merely shows how deeply Emacs has 
affected my perception and caused me to use words differently from how others 
use them :-).  After 28 years inside Emacs, the phrase "text editor" for me 
simply *means* all the things Emacs does with text -- including handling email, 
running command-line shells, browsing directory structures, performing version 
control operations, etc.

(Vi/vim also highly rewards investment, as a pure text editor in the more 
limited sense that you mean, although in practice its users don't seem to take 
extensibility quite as far as the most dedicated Emacs users do.)

Anyway, I agree with you, and an improved phrasing might be:

"GNU Emacs's raison d'être is to be the text manipulation environment that best 
rewards sustained user investment."

>I like your notion of environment better, because Emacs should be the
>glue between - effective - processes or workflows which (can and will)
>arise around textual representations.

Yep.

(I agree with your later observations about Org Mode too, but my point is not 
about any particular mode or package, of course.)

Best regards,
-Karl