Christoffer Stjernlöf over at Two Wrongs has a very well done post on Why You Should Buy Into the Emacs Platform. Posts on “Why I moved to Emacs” are common, of course, but Stjernlöf has written a comprehensive post that recognizes Emacs as more of an environment than just an editor.

He notes, for example, that you can edit code with any old editor but only Emacs can give you Magit. He says that Magit alone is reason enough to adopt Emacs but there are many other applications available with the Emacs platform. You can even write your own applications for Emacs if you like.

There’s no point in me listing all the Emacs features and packages that Stjernlöf admires; you should go read his post. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that in keeping with his holistic view of Emacs, Stjernlöf lists many ELPA packages that he finds useful. Evaluating a piece of software by taking into consideration addons that third parties wrote my seem like cheating but it isn’t. Almost all of us have several packages installed to make our editing easier or to deal with tasks such as Email or RSS. It’s the packages that make Emacs an environment worth spending the time to explore and learn.

In any event, Stjernlöf’s post is interesting and worth a read.