> And why not Emacs? I need an editor, not an OS.

On the one hand, it is true that Emacs is more of a Lisp runtime with a text-oriented Lisp Machine GUI application development toolkit and a powerful shell (or Perl?)-level standard library for manipulating files, directories, text, and other processes built in, with an editor as a mere example application, and that as a result, its capabilities are far broader and more powerful than just a simple text editor, and that this is borne out in both how the community tends to use it, and in the ecosystem of tools and applications around it.

On the other, I think this meme of dismissing it out of hand for that is just... Wrong. It's perfectly possible to use emacs like it's just a very good text editor and nothing more if that's how you want to use it; I used it that way for years, because the operating system aspects don't have to intrude on your use of it at all if you don't want them to, unlike IDEs. And it isn't bigger or more resource hungry in comparison to many modern editors like Kate for those extra capabilities it offers. They aren't even loaded into memory unless you use them, and when they aren't loaded, they're stored as gzipped plain text. So when the installed size of the "emacs" meta-package from Debian is 51 kilobytes, and the install size of the "kate" meta-package from Debian is 8,000 kilobytes, and the largest memory usage I've ever seen Emacs as a text editor take up on my computer is 230 megabytes, which is almost certainly smaller than Kate, and Emacs having copious capabilities outside of being a strictly focused text editor doesn't really have to affect how you use it day to day if you don't want those features, then the only way in which this "bloat" could serve as a reason to dismiss emacs is on the basis of dogmas, since it "being an OS" doesn't make it use any more resources than something you're perfectly happy to accept. Like the people that dismiss emacs on this basis can't really seem to outline how it affects them that someone else could use Emacs as an IRC client. They just seem to be motivated by this abstract obsessive compulsive need to adhere to a certain philosophy — that using a program with many features or the capability to have many features that they don't use would bother them as a matter of principle for some reason.

And the kicker of the matter is that the direction in which this person is trying to force Kate is exactly the way that Emacs users use it that gets it accused of being an operating system: extending it to have functionality beyond that of a pure text editor into the domain of note-taking and agenda management and reminders and so on. So clearly you do want an "OS," not a text editor, anyway! But for some reason you're doing it with a bunch of hacky Python and shell scripts that are fragile and difficult to set up and don't integrate very well with the editor and offer a tiny fraction of the features that the real versions in Emacs do. (For instance, that agenda view is just a static printing of TODO items. You can't click on them to jump to where they are in their file or toggle their progress state in the agenda view or clock in and out of them from that view or search through them based on tags or their content or their status or due date, and it'd be very difficult to integrate such functionality into Kate).

I'm not saying that this person should switch to emacs or even that they are in any way obligated to check it out if they are happy with Kate and it allows them to get the work they want to do done. I'm just saying that despite how sort of technically true this saying is, when it's used as a reason to dismiss emacs, it's just kind of dogmatic and shortsighted and that makes me kind of sad.