Comment by imiric

Learning and using Emacs is possibly the activity with the highest ROI over time you can do if you work with text for a living. Maybe even if you don't.

Every time you modify it, you are improving your workflow. Those changes compound over time so that the system is always familiar, which makes interacting with text, the filesystem, network, and anything else you can manipulate with Elisp, that much easier, faster, and more comfortable. What you end up with is a system that is unique to you. A system that does what you want the way you want it, and never changes unless you want it to. In a world where software constantly changes and breaks, where new editors appear and disappear, using your own version of Emacs is incredibly comforting. There are no surprises, no rugpulls, no radical UI redesigns, no sneaky telemetry or tracking, no ads, no nagware, and so on. Anything you don't like can be removed, changed, or improved.

It's not perfect, of course. It's slow, alien in many ways, lags behind in features of modern editors, and has a brutally steep learning curve, especially if you're not familiar with Lisps. It may take you years to appreciate it, and a lifetime to understand it. But that's OK. You don't need to understand all of it. As long as you start the journey, you can learn on the way, and your experience will keep improving.