Emacs is supposedly a text editor but is more of a integrated computing environment. At its core is an Emacs Lisp interpreter and a text and buffer-oriented set of conventions that Emacs Lisp code follows. The “default”/“standard” build of Emacs contains a World Wide Web browser, newsreader, electronic mail client, Internet Relay Chat client, a few games, and overall a ton of stuff that I do not use, need or want in my environment. Therefore I use a minimal-ish custom build (i.e. simply leaving stuff out during ./configure, which makes me feel a bit better.
One problem that I've recently noticed with Emacs is the tendency to use a set amount of spaces, expecting a monospace font, to align items across a buffer. For example, when :tags are used with org-agenda, the agenda page aligns the tags to the right of the page with spaces precalculated from the window size. But when we have double-width unicode characters, for example Chinese characters in the mix, or if we are using a variable-width Latin font, the alignment is completely screwed up. Resizing the window also doesn't update the wrapping and alignment of items inside. Emacs's text buffer-centric design makes it really hard to do otherwise.
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