The more I learn about emacs the more I'm happy I never joined the cult
Don't waste my time with 70s "ergonomics" (if it can even be called that)
The comparisons with art seem almost to the point of offense to me. You're not building art, you're just building another yet plugin for emacs to do what other people do in maybe 5% less efficient ways but won't spend 2 days automating it
Emacs don’t have plugins. Emacs only have a small C core (kernel) that handles very low level details. Everything else is lisp code split into packages (libraries and utilities). And being a lisp means you can alter and redefine any symbol you want.
The thing is that, there’s enough packages built-in and by third-party, you never really write your own. My whole config is pretty much setting options and linking packages together.
Emacs changes big O. It is not about changing constant factor. If you need N commands with M features then you can implement and combine them in emacs in O(N+M), to get O(N*M) custom commands.
For example, if you need “Search” feature then you can use it everywhere. It can help find you a file in Dired buffer. It can help you find a git chunk in magit. It can help you find todo item in Org mode, etc. It like having a separate `uniq` command instead of implementing it for each shell command (`sort -u` vs. `sort | uniq`). Another example, having `repeat <N> <cmd>` to repeat `<cmd>` command `<N>` times in zsh vs. implementing `<cmd> —repeat <N>` for each command.
The difference is linear vs. quadratic. If you need to do 1000 actions that can be decomposed into 100 commands with 10 features each then in emacs then you need to know and understand ~100 things vs. 1000 in less customizable environments.
There are a lot of caveats but in general the "spend 2 days" thing is a lot less true now IMHO thanks to LLM's that can write mostly correct elisp from basic specifications. YMMV of course. I have found this can also open up to being a lot more than "maybe 5% more efficient" for niche applications. It's the closest environment I've used to where the friction between "I wish my editor could do <x>" and actually having the feature almost disappears.
Don't waste my time with 70s "ergonomics" (if it can even be called that)
The comparisons with art seem almost to the point of offense to me. You're not building art, you're just building another yet plugin for emacs to do what other people do in maybe 5% less efficient ways but won't spend 2 days automating it