Byter

Well, I started using Emacs because I was feeling limited by my Vim+Tmux-based workflow. Like you've heard from others, what convinced me was the consistency in interface, and the composability that enables.

Everything is a text buffer. When the text is drawn to screen, it might be resized, colored, hidden, replaced with images, etc, but it's all still just text. Because of that consistency of medium, all your interactions boil down to manipulations of that text.

What's important isn't the verbatim text, but what the text represents. It could be code (symbol, function, library, in any language, literately), prose (word, sentence, paragraph, or whole book), a file or directory, a button, a list, a foldable outline, a process, a container, a game tile, a typo, a secret, a git object, a pull request, the string you're looking for, a definition, a chat message, an RSS feed/item, a web page, etc...

Each of those has a mode (or modes) that makes interacting with those objects in a semantically meaningful way both efficient and composable (to varying degrees).

That's why Emacs devotees try to do everything in Emacs. Leaving Emacs means leaving that consistency and semantic expressiveness behind. In a CLI shell, yes everything is text, but it's comparatively raw. The best you can do is define variables and color it. TUIs bridge the semantic-meaning gap, but aren't composable with each other. (Same with GUIs, but because of administering remote systems I avoided them when possible.) You can't add functionality to htop without recompiling the whole thing. You can't pipe ncdu's results to rsync. Emacs is a live Lisp machine. You can redefine (or advise) any function on a whim, without restarting.

That's not even getting into how everything you do to improve interacting with text improves your experience with all those text-encoded objects. Completions can be filtered and ranked by different algorithms, lines can be "narrowed" to, it has an interactive regex builder, you can autofill with simple, intelligent predictions (like, what's under your cursor, or a prefix-matching word up-buffer), you can deeply integrate LLMs, reflow and pretty print, follow externally-edited files, transparently access remote resources...

I don't know. Obviously it's not for everyone, but using Emacs makes me feel liberated; in control of my software. I love it.

Thanks for giving me a soapbox and the opportunity to put my thoughts together.

(Full disclosure -- I put your post verbatim into GPT-4o and checked to see if the answer looked right.)

Ace Online (previously Space Cowboy Online)?

This almost certainly doesn't help you, but I do this kind of interactive-computing-in-a-consistent-interface with Emacs.

Emacs has modes (think, extensions) to do all those things and more.

It can also be a global application (/arbitrary function) launcher as demonstrated in this post.

The only problem is you have to give Emacs your heart, or it won't work.

Like most of GMing, it's an art. You get a feel for it based on the players and the system.

Follow one group until there's a natural break in the action, or their need to make decisions, or just until the other group gets fidgety.

Like television does, with cuts back and forth on story beats.

"Okay, you guys set to work rooting around for the McGuffin in the library. Meanwhile! Group B, what are you doing?"

Secondarily, encourage (remote) communication if the setting allows it. Give one group a clue that will help the other group, but it must be conveyed.

Objects in LEO fall quickly (months to single-digit years) without station-keeping, mostly from atmospheric drag. Anything we put there wouldn't contribute to a long-term Kessler Syndrome situation. It's geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) we have to worry about, but once you're up that high there's a lot more room for everything.

It was many months between announcement and release of their previous hardware. How soon do you need a laptop?

There's an app to pull the Astronomy Picture of the Day and set it as a wallpaper

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.jakelee.apodwallpaper

But it's the big releases that have the most bugs and UX breakage

I use it often to share large files (pictures and videos, mostly).

Clones of face buttons.

Discord Push-to-Talk.

In Factorio the keyboard modifiers (alt, ctrl) are back there.