The Best Emacs Microfeature
When Emacs users explain why they use it, it’s usually big picture features: elisp, org-mode, dired. The fact that it’s been around forever and will continue to be around for decades to come. For me it’s the humble M-q, or, in the vernacular, Alt+q or Option+q. This is the key combination for fill-paragraph. It reshapes a paragraph of text so that it fits under 80 columns.
This is a marvelously useful feature that is sadly absent from many other editors. I would probably have switched to Zed already if it had this, or the ability to extend the editor with custom buffer-manipulation commands.
If you’re writing prose your lines will frequently exceed the width of the editor. Then you have two choices. You can use word-wrap, which doesn’t play well with indentation for nested content:
Or you can insert newlines so that the text fits within the column limit, but doing this by hand is incredibly tedious. Enter M-q:
