For me, it is not the ability to write plugins : most editors have those to some extent.

For me it’s more about the ease of writing your own customizations and not be limited to those provided by your plugins.

A few examples

• don’t like some built in or plugin behavior ? Copy paste the original source code, tweak it to your likint and use add-advice to use your new version
• just yesterday i had some tests which generated a log in a temporary folder, 5 folders deep. I wrote a new command and bound it to a shortcut that looked for the new log file and opened it after running my tests
• i wrote a simple log browser : use a few commands to preformat the file with query/replace, and boom with emacs’ outline mode i can fold sections /subsections. This command is 10 lines long.

The strength of emacs is not its plugins, it’s your ease of making it your own

This is the way, adress pain points, don’t do things for the sake of it.

You will naturally dig deeper in the things that matter to you

If you hear of some fancy new package, read/watch an introduction about it and ask yourself if it would actually solve one of your issues. If it doesn’t really, pass