> I am not going to completely change my editor and rebuild two decades of optimization just to use two Emacs tools.

Change your editor and rebuild two decades of optimisation in order to use Emacs, two Emacs tools, and also every other Emacs tool out there. Org Mode, TRAMP, Magit, gptel, eglot, flycheck, elfeed, ERC, Emms, EWW … there are a ton of reasons to use Emacs.

Or you can keep using less-capable systems and being annoyed when folks recommend that you upgrade.

Your argument highlights its own flaw; changing your editor opens up a world of tooling that's certainly adequate for most use cases you can throw at it, but it also requires either discarding or (worse) un-learning all of the tooling that you've learned for your current editor.

For example, I'm perfectly content to use nvim as my primary editor, and this was born out of having to develop for and administer literally tens of thousands of linux servers professionally. I have all the plug-ins and configuration necessary for productivity on my development machines, and when I'm on a remote system ad hoc editing a configuration it already has a built-in lightweight version of the editor I'm already used to.

If I switched to Emacs locally, I'd still have to maintain a working knowledge of vi and context switch when in a remote shell. Changing to Emacs would require more cognitive bandwidth when the whole purpose of "switching for org mode" is to reduce mental load.

> If I switched to Emacs locally, I'd still have to maintain a working knowledge of vi and context switch when in a remote shell.

Even ignoring the possibility of installing Emacs on remote systems, there are still alternatives:

1. You can run remote shells within Emacs, and edit files remotely using TRAMP. When you are editing a remote file, shell commands run from Emacs run on the remote system.

2. You could use Evil, the Emacs implementation of vim. Then you would use the same bindings everywhere.

3. I have been running Emacs locally for literal decades now, but I still remember and use vi frequently, both locally and remotely. It’s really not a problem.

I feel like there must be an editor version of the Blub Paradox.

> Or you can keep using less-capable systems and being annoyed when folks recommend that you upgrade.

Or I get to choose the most logical option yet: keep being annoyed when haughty people keep trying to push a downgrade on me as a supposed 'upgrade'.

You are just living in your own world and forcing others to move there. Thats not how it works.

Who’s forcing? I’m recommending.

> I am not going to completely change my editor and rebuild two decades of optimization just to use two Emacs tools.

Fair point on the surface, it's missing the key aspect of what Emacs actually is. Emacs is not just an editor - to a degree it's philosophy is that your computing environment should be malleable. Those two decades of optimization don't get thrown away; they get encoded directly into the system. Instead of learning to work around the limitations of separate tools, you're investing in a platform that can absorb and amplify all that accumulated knowledge. The question isn't whether you want to abandon your workflows, but whether you want to be limited by them forever.

The key insight is reframing it from "starting over" to "finally having a place where all that expertise can compound indefinitely."

I mean, I get it - not everyone wants their editor to be infinitely customizable; sometimes you just want something that works out of the box. Yet I do honestly think every programmer should give Emacs a serious try at some point in their career - not because they'll necessarily stick with it, but for the same reason why everyone should learn at least one OOP language and get introduced to an FP language. It expands your thinking about what's possible.

Even if you go back to your previous tools, you'll understand computing differently, having seen what a truly malleable environment looks like, the idea of a truly personal computing environment - one that grows with you rather than constraining you. Dismissing Emacs as "just another editor" misses what makes it fundamentally different.

I completely understand your impulse (been there myself), but I'd encourage you to keep an open mind about what Emacs actually offers. When you get a chance maybe explore the philosophy behind it. You might discover something unexpectedly rewarding.

Agreed on TRAMP. It's great and all, but not worth abandoning your toolong.

org-mode though... It's called Emacs' killer app for a reason. Even if I only used Emacs for org-mode it'd be worth it. And I don't even use the productivity features.