1. I got tired of mutt as a mail reader, and thought gnus was the way to get what I wanted. I want a text based mail reader – nongraphical. A year later, I still haven’t shifted to gnus. However, that’s unrelated to the discussion at hand.

2. I wanted a better programming editor. Now I’m not a programmer – I’m an engineer. I was, however, doing a lot of Python programming in Linux, and the one editor that I had liked started acting up after an upgrade. Furthermore, occasionally I want to code in not-so-popular languages (POV-Ray scripting, or text adventure game programming), and I didn’t want to keep finding and learning new editors for each “language” I wanted to play in. I had noticed over the years that when I search for editors for a language, Emacs would always come up – no matter how obscure the language.

So I decided to stop avoiding Emacs, and jumped into it. I was a grad student at the time, so I had the free time. I just spent one whole spring break trying to learn as much of it as I could.

These were the only reasons I wanted to learn it. In the end, I’ve become one of those guys who uses Emacs for a lot more than text editing. It was simply an unintended consequence.

Now, keep in mind that I’m a Linux person, so using Emacs for a lot more than text editing does come a bit more naturally and plays well with other tools on Linux than it would on Windows.

Now that I have a job (which involves minor simple programming), I still try to do as much as I can in Emacs, and it hasn’t been a problem. Emacs macros have come in real handy – I’d process files in a much quicker and simpler manner whereas others would try to write scripts to do the job.

If I were looking at Emacs for the first time now, my reaction would probably be “You’ve got to be kidding.

Not so for me – but again, perhaps because I’m in the Linux world and grew up on DOS (I’ve spent the least amount of time in Windows). I only really dived into Emacs a year ago.

Emacs for me was a lot more intuitive than vi. Now that’s an editor that is even “worse” than Emacs when it comes to CUA type bindings for movement and copy-pasting. I tried learning that first and failed. To each his/her own.

@Andrew and @Alex: Thank you for the suggestions. I may use them some day, but for now I’d like to keep Emacs and Windows separate rather than trying to make either act more like the other. Here’s why.

When I was growing up, I learned to play clarinet, sax, and flute, not that I’m great at any of them. When I was learning a new instrument, it was tempting to carry over techniques from an instrument I already knew. Sometimes this was fine — the three instruments have a lot in common — but sometimes what was good technique on one was bad technique on another. With practice I learned to play each as it was intended to be played. Sometimes I have to switch quickly between instruments, but muscle memory takes over: when I’m holding a flute in my hands, I immediately switch into flute mode, etc. I’m hoping I’ll get to the same point with Emacs and Windows.

Emacs is complex, but it’s complex in a way I think I’d prefer to other kinds of complexity: the aggregate complexity of the various pieces of software it may replace, the complexity of using software that is not as configurable, the complexity of learning different tools on different operating systems, etc.

C++ is an interesting comparison. I learned C++ before I had other options and before I realized how complex it is. Now that I have used it for so long, it’s not difficult. But I imagine learning C++ after having started with something simpler would be quite painful.

In the same way, I had a head start using Emacs. I learned Emacs years ago when I had fewer options. If I were looking at Emacs for the first time now, my reaction would probably be “You’ve got to be kidding.” But when I started (re)learning Emacs a couple months ago, I had a memory in the back of my mind of what Emacs flow felt like. That motivated me to push past some of the quirks.

Going back to Emacs wasn’t my first choice. I wanted to find a powerful, highly configurable text editor that was more of a modern Windows application as I describe here. I never found anything that met my expectations and reluctantly decided to try Emacs again.

As far as your goal to reduce the number of applications you are using, good luck. I’ve failed miserably, mostly because I am a creature of habit.