First my rationale behind loving this lil plugin. Not only is it a powerful interface for navigating my code, but it is a consistant interface. Once I get the muscle memory for navigating one thing (say buffers), I can use that to navigate all the things (say yank history).

Am I the only one that feels like vim just became emacs?

It has been going that way for quite a few years, maybe it is only natural.

I wasn't aware emacs had a thriving plugins community.

Why do you think so?

It's hard to tell exactly what the features are, even after reading the article and the github README :(

Yeah, I was struggling working it out too, but eventually managed to use it and it's pretty great. I found that the file search works better than ctrlp (and you don't need to wait!), and other options like listing all open buffers and switching quickly between them is really great. Another interesting feature is the line search. I'm used to search using / but this one instead of highlighting the text as you type, it fuzzy searches and eliminate all other lines. Pretty neat.

Overall, I think it's worth the effort I went through to install it. Hope I find time to write a 'Unite guide for dummies (like me)' some day...

RTFA - this link appears in the first paragraph.

It looks like a clone of Helm (previously called Anything) for Emacs:

https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm