> the defaults are crap

As someone who has recently joined the 1k LOC Emacs configuration file club, I have to disagree. The default settings are a well thought out starting point that needs minimal tweaking to get to exactly where you want. I try out a lot of packages on ELPA, and many that purport to provide alternatives for defaults end up being inferior to using the defaults with some small tweaks. The convenient thing is that you can customize the third-party packages in the same way and just use the parts you like from them.

The other good thing about Emacs is that you don't need a separate window manager[1], and you don't need to use a separate command shell (Emacs comes with eshell), or to use a terminal emulator for SSHing into remote machines (eshell over TRAMP is absolutely amazing), or a file manager (Emacs comes with dired, which works over TRAMP which is amazing), or a...

[1] https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm

My favourite Emacs goodie to highlight is magit because it really changed the way I use git. All of a sudden, it's incredibly simple to (un-)stage individual hunks, etc. And of course it works over TRAMP, too :)

org-mode is a good one, too, but I feel like I've barely scratched the surface there.

The hunk feature of magit is great; you can easily stage/unstage not only at the hunk granularity but also arbitrary lines using the selection. Being able to easily do that was something I really missed when I moved from darcs to git.

When it comes to magit and TRAMP, definitely the best part is with-editor[1]. This is one of those ingenious "why didn't I think of this?" hacks to let you use your local Emacs as EDITOR on remote machines without having to do SSH port forwarding for emacsclient.

[1] https://github.com/magit/with-editor

eshell over TRAMP? how does that work?

Any pathname in eshell can be a TRAMP pathname on a remote machine. So you just cd to a remote directory and eshell will run commands on the remote machine. You can redirect remote command output to a local file, local command output to a remote file, cp from remote pathname on machine A to remote pathname on machine B, etc.

At some point I realized that I wasted months in those rabbit holes customizing and tweaking shell configs, window managers and Emacs. Any gain in productivity (which may not even be there as it is rather subjective) was not able to offset it. So I stopped it. These days I just use Gnome Shell with a single extension to fix something that I cannot get used at all, simple bash config to setup environment for development with no customization on shell behavior, and a programming editor that mostly matches my taste. On a new machine I can finish all customization within 5 minutes and forget about it.

I even started to suspect that an easy customization of a tool can be a bad sign. It is almost like developers delegates all usability issues to the end user making the default case really bad.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16152639 :)

Wait, what? You recommend Emacs but not StumpWM?

I've used -- for longer periods of time, of course -- Awesome, Xmonad, i3, and dwm; while some of them are better at some things than StumpWM, StumpWM is the only one that provides an Emacs, live-hackable experience. So these days, I strongly prefer that.

I've been hearing about Emacs X Window Manager but haven't given it a shot yet https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm