alt Hacker NewsLearning and using Emacs is possibly the activity with the highest ROI over time you can do if you work with text for a living. Maybe even if you don't.
Every time you modify it, you are improving your workflow. Those changes compound over time so that the system is always familiar, which makes interacting with text, the filesystem, network, and anything else you can manipulate with Elisp, that much easier, faster, and more comfortable. What you end up with is a system that is unique to you. A system that does what you want the way you want it, and never changes unless you want it to. In a world where software constantly changes and breaks, where new editors appear and disappear, using your own version of Emacs is incredibly comforting. There are no surprises, no rugpulls, no radical UI redesigns, no sneaky telemetry or tracking, no ads, no nagware, and so on. Anything you don't like can be removed, changed, or improved.
It's not perfect, of course. It's slow, alien in many ways, lags behind in features of modern editors, and has a brutally steep learning curve, especially if you're not familiar with Lisps. It may take you years to appreciate it, and a lifetime to understand it. But that's OK. You don't need to understand all of it. As long as you start the journey, you can learn on the way, and your experience will keep improving.
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I have been using Emacs for 35 years and I am still learning along the way. It has been the one constant across Solaris, Linux, Windows and macOS for all that time.
Emacs takes a lifetime to learn. The sooner you start the longer it takes!
Also the default keybindings used by Emacs to do basic text operations are available in many places thanks to GNU Readline and Cocoa, which makes the experience more pleasant.
> brutally steep learning curve.... It may take you years to appreciate it, and a lifetime to understand it. But that's OK.
It isn't, that's how apps decline in popularity and eventually die, thus decreasing the value of the huge amount of time you've invested
> lags behind in features of modern editors
I have been using emacs for around 7 years, but it never worked for me as the main editor, it just sucked too bad compared to IDE-like features of other editors and actual IDEs. So I only used it for org-mode, doing an attempt to use it for something else every couple of years.
I'm currently in the process of trying this again, and I have to say things feel very different this time. By adding native tree-sitter and LSP support, the IDE-like features are outsourced to where they should be done. It wasn't perfect, but I had issues of the same degree or worse with other editors. A proprietary IDE still would beat it in stability and features, but the experience is _crazy good_ for free software.
What I like the most is the hacker mentality it encourages. When I see something I don't like, I don't go like "I wish they did it differently", I ask "well how do I change that?".
The only thing that feels truly outdated is single-threaded nature and blocking UI when long-running operation (like an update) is happening. And maybe non-smooth scroll (there is a package but it makes text jump).