> only those who use emacs know it is possible

Emacs is weird; some people "get it," some, even after using it for years, just never do. The thing "to get" about Emacs is a knack for quickly automating things. Those with shallow exposure to Emacs think that Emacs users are doomed to tinker with their configs all the time. In reality, that's not entirely accurate. I can share so many fascinating, practical examples where I needed to get something done on my computer, and Emacs either already had all the pieces required or provided me with facilities to build upon.

Exhibit A: One day, while taking notes and having to jump between multiple web pages in my browser, I got irritated by having to jump to the browser, finding the tab, going back to my editor, etc. I wrote a function that lets me control my browser tabs directly from Emacs. Why? Because it's convenient, and because it wasn't that hard to make.

Exhibit B: Few days ago, my colleague was showing me something over Zoom. I didn't want to derail his train of thought, I didn't want to keep interrupting him with: "hey, wait, don't scroll away just yet", "can you share that link with me?", "whoa, hold on a second, I need to write that down", etc. Over the lunch break I decided to solve this problem for myself. I use Flameshot. I checked if there are any plugins for it. Turns out there's an open GH Issue, that's all. So, I wrote a command that checks ~/Desktop folder - that's where my screenshots get dropped, then finds the last .png (if it's created less than 2 mins ago, otherwise prompts for a file), sends it to tesseract (a tool, the existence of which I haven't heard until that moment), then opens the OCRed text in a buffer. Now I can quickly select any area on my screen and retrieve text from it with a single keystroke.

Exhibit C: I use Google Translate directly from Emacs. Which by itself is nothing out of the ordinary. Pretty much every other editor has some kind of plugin for that shit. I was reading articles in a foreign language I'm learning, sending pieces to get translated - again, nothing new here. However, it doesn't translate numbers, and that's normal and totally expected. Yet, I wanted to see numbers in their written form. What did I do? I found the function it calls before sending text to GTranslate API, and using advising mechanism, wrote a function that right before sending a request, searches for numbers in the original text and turns them into written form, and then sends that for translation. Advising feature is extremely powerful and it doesn't exist in any other editor beside maybe Lem - neither VSCode, nor Vim, nor IntelliJ, nor Sublime has that stuff. Did I have to look up GTranslate API docs? Nope. Did I really need to sift through the Emacs google-translate package code? Not really. I just needed to find the function responsible and needed to know its signature. Took me less than 15 minutes and fewer than 30 lines of code, most of which is my comments explaining the hack. I couldn't even find a generic Elisp function to translate numbers to words, I just used some npm package for that.

I can tell you many stories like that: the million reasons why I can't ever abandon Emacs and why I love it. I don't care that traditionalists using IDEs think I'm delusional, I've seen that world - it has its perks but also limitations. My world of Emacs not without its own drawbacks yet it allows me to hack some stupid shit almost effortlessly. I guess tis ain't that stupid if thy shit actually works, eh?