That's because the Emacs comment missed Emacs's greatest feature: elisp. Adding functionality--even fairly complex functionality--to Emacs is much easier than extending any other editor I've used. Here are a couple of great examples from the last week for me:
I am currently taking a compiler course where we are implementing a particular language not entirely unlike--but not entirely like--Lua and Python. As part of the process, we need to churn out quite a bit of test code. Naturally, Emacs does not support this language by default because this language only exists as an implementation exercise for a couple of projects; however, creating a useful mode that does syntax highlighting and indentation--basically all you need to program comfortably--only took about 100 lines of code and less than an hour of programming!
Apart from my studies, I also work part-time at a startup. As part of this, I have to use and maintain a bunch of remote AWS machines that do all sorts of things: hosting, continuous integration, staging... I noticed that I was opening a lot of shells both locally and remotely. Writing up a command bound to a global key-stroke that prompts me for a name, opens a shell in the current directory (including remote directories!) and sets the prompt of the shell to its name literally took five minutes. And now I've saved a lot of time managing all my shells.
Being able to make my editor do exactly what I want with a trivial amount of effort is magical.
I am currently taking a compiler course where we are implementing a particular language not entirely unlike--but not entirely like--Lua and Python. As part of the process, we need to churn out quite a bit of test code. Naturally, Emacs does not support this language by default because this language only exists as an implementation exercise for a couple of projects; however, creating a useful mode that does syntax highlighting and indentation--basically all you need to program comfortably--only took about 100 lines of code and less than an hour of programming!
Apart from my studies, I also work part-time at a startup. As part of this, I have to use and maintain a bunch of remote AWS machines that do all sorts of things: hosting, continuous integration, staging... I noticed that I was opening a lot of shells both locally and remotely. Writing up a command bound to a global key-stroke that prompts me for a name, opens a shell in the current directory (including remote directories!) and sets the prompt of the shell to its name literally took five minutes. And now I've saved a lot of time managing all my shells.
Being able to make my editor do exactly what I want with a trivial amount of effort is magical.