Its about something thats damn near an OS, an IDE, a direditor AND gives you access to its guts AND is programmable AND can record keystrokes from the interface and manage them programmatically.

And is Minimalist, needing not even a mouse to use.

For me, the WYSIWYG interfaces prevent me from forming a good mental model of what it is I'm working on. I become completely dependent on the over-lying representation presented by them, and my understanding and insight into things becomes actually blocked by the attempt at meta-level abstraction.

EMACS is cool because it flips the whole thing on its head, its literally a tool for understanding (okay, okay, I know, its a damn text editor, but bear with me...). When i interface with a programming language or markup language through emacs, I can use my understanding of that structure to manipulate the behavior of the editor (via saved macros and lisp 'ditties') to my own mental model.

My current job has forced me into using an 'IDE' (jetbrains) almost exclusively for 2 years, which means my emacs knowledge has deteriorated badly due to my nemises in life: I forget nearly as fast as i learn. The IDE os okay, but it doesn't do anything that I couldn't figure out an easy way to do in emacs, and I find myself crutching on it all the time.

VI is cool, I just don't use it unless its all that the term I'm using has- I understand from many respected programmers that its also turing-complete programmable built on C instead of LISP.

DL