Emacs is not a great text editor in and of itself—it’s a building material for the best text editor you can make for yourself.
I find this to be absolutely true as I stare at my 1700 line init.el
that customizes Emacs to my needs. There is a way to do pretty much anything you could want with enough fiddling.
Read Why Emacs: Redux by Bozhidar Batsov.
Links to this note
Defadvice
Is Text Editor SuperglueThe Emacs
advice
system lets you modify the code running Emacs in a simple way. For example, if you wanted to change one line in a package you use to do something different or fix a bug before the maintainers release a new version, you can “advise” code to do what you want.