>> What is it, exactly, that makes Emacs so fantastic? What does it
>> actually *do* beyond being a text editor?
> 
> Lots. But its household name is historical, goes back to the dark ages of
> computing. There are dozens of quite decent free text editors nowadays.

OK, I can kind of see that. Way back in the dark ages, when text files 
were generated by having a professional typist type it onto punch cards, 
where people operated computers using monochrome dumb terminals 
connected to a mainframe, and where the only way to operate on a text 
file was edlin, I can imagine Emacs causing a stir. Everybody uses edlin 
to painfully crawl through a file one line at a time, and then suddenly 
this thing comes along with realtime interactive full-screen text 
editing, scrolling and multiple windows in its text-based UI, 
sophsticated facilities such as find and replace that previously 
required complicated shell scripting, and all completely customisable 
using a high-end interpretted scripting language called Lisp. It must 
have seemed so futuristic back then.

It just seems to me that now almost everything Emacs does can also be 
done by half a dozen other tools - most of which don't require you to 
memorise long sequences of keyboard acrobatics to do things. So while I 
get that Emacs seemed amazing 30 years ago, why do people still use it 
today?

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