The Emacs Problem: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem
A good discussion of lispiness, the inherent structure in many text formats, and editors that are dynamically configurable.
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One interesting design choice in Emacs that I haven't seen in other editors: reserved shortcuts.
An Emacs extension shouldn't use F5 through F12, or Ctrl-c LETTER. This lets users configure their own shortcuts. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Key-Bindings.html
Does it exist elsewhere? I miss it in VS Code, where e.g. all the Fn keys are already assigned.
Sometimes programming tools are so good that you miss them when using other languages. I see these mentioned the most frequently:
* IntelliJ (for Java)
* Slime+Emacs (for Common Lisp)
* Pharo (for Smalltalk)
I'm struck that they all have bespoke UIs.
Today I learnt that Emacs 28 shipped a context-menu-mode! https://oylenshpeegul.gitlab.io/blog/posts/20230129/
This seems quintessentially Emacs: deeply hackable, but building UI features in an order very different to the mainstream.