Why use Emacs?

Colorful text editor

Emacs is a very powerful text processor, giving you the power to manipulate documents quickly and efficiently. You can easily move through and edit paragraphs, sentences, words, and logical blocks; blaze through text using powerful search tools; and easily edit thousands of lines at once using regular expressions, keyboard macros and more.

Emacs can be customized in every conceivable way, including its looks. You can strip it down, choose between dozens of easy to install themes with M-x load-theme , or even create your own and share it with your friends. Here are a couple of nice theme galleries: Emacs Themes, Emacs Theme Gallery.

Et tu, Programmer?

There are tools for every programming language out there. Lisp, Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, Erlang, JavaScript, C, C++, Prolog, Tcl, AWK, PostScript, Clojure, Scala, Perl, Haskell, Elixir all of these languages and more are supported in Emacs. Because of the powerful Lisp core, Emacs is easy to extend to add support for new languages if the urge strikes you.

You get lots of features out of the box, including syntax highlighting, automatic indentation, REPL support, debugging, code browsing, version control integration and much more.

Vim user?

Let me tell you about Spacemacs! Spacemacs is a community-driven Emacs distribution that brings together the world of Vim and Emacs into one text editor. It also features ergonomics and mnemonic key binding design, and also works great as a starter pack for newcomers.

If you just want to use Vim inside Emacs, you can check out Evil Mode, an extensible vi layer for Emacs that emulates the main features of Vim.

More!

Org mode helps you to keep notes, maintain TODO lists, plan projects and author documents. You can use your Org documents to create HTML websites like this one or export to LaTeX, Beamer, OpenDocuments and many other formats.

Tramp allows you to edit remote files without leaving Emacs. You can seamlessly edit files on remote servers via SSH or FTP, edit local files with su/sudo, and much more.

M-x butterfly unleashes the powers of the butterfly. The real way of programming.

Use the built in IRC client ERC along with BitlBee to connect to your favorite chat services, or use the Jabber package to hop on any XMPP service.

Out of the box Emacs includes a mail client, web browser, calendar, and games; you can even edit video and images inside Emacs. There are more than 3,000 packages for Emacs, and more are written all the time. You can easily extend your Emacs with new packages from GNU ELPA, MELPA and Marmelade repositories.