Recently I read Avoiding Emacs bankruptcy, with good financial habits (via), which sparked some thoughts. One of them is that I feel that GNU Emacs is an editor that winds up with personal customizations from people who use it, even if you don't opt to install any third party packages and stick purely with what comes with Emacs.

There are editors that you can happily use in their stock or almost stock configuration; this is most of how I use vim. In theory you can use Emacs this way too. In practice I think that GNU Emacs is not such an editor. You can use GNU Emacs without any customization and it will edit text and do a variety of useful things for you, but I believe you're going to run into a variety of limitations with the result that will push you towards at least basic customization of built in settings.

I believe that there are multiple issues, at least:

• The outside world can have multiple options where you have to configure the choice (such as what C indentation style to use) that matches your local environment.

• Emacs (and its built in packages) are opinionated and those opinions are not necessarily yours. If opinions clash enough, you'll very much want to change some settings to your opinions.

  (This drove a lot of my customization of GNU Emacs' MH-E mode, although some of that was that I was already a user of (N)MH.)

• You want to (automatically) enable certain things that aren't on by default, such as specific minor modes or specific completion styles. Sure, you can turn on appealing minor modes by hand, but this gets old pretty fast.

• Some things may need configuration and have no defaults that Emacs can provide, so either you put in your specific information or you don't get that particular (built in) package working.

Avoiding all of these means using GNU Emacs in a constrained way, settling for basic Emacs style text editing instead of the intelligent environment that GNU Emacs can be. Or to put it another way, Emacs makes it appealing to tap into its power with only a few minor settings through the built in customization system (at least initially).

I believe that most people who pick GNU Emacs and stick with it want to use something like its full power and capability; they aren't picking it up as a basic text editor. Even without third party packages, this leads them to non-trivial customizations to their specific environment, opinions, and necessary choices.

(Perhaps this is unsurprising and is widely accepted within the GNU Emacs community. Or perhaps there is a significant sub-community that does use GNU Emacs only in its role as a basic text editor, without the various superintelligence that it's capable of.)