> I’m curious what the difference is between that and having pinned windows in Ubuntu

The difference is the text consumption. Can you easily retrieve any text you're seeing on the screen into your editor?

Inserting any piece of text I see on the screen into my notes? A couple of keystrokes. I can grab text in any form, even if it's a frame in a YT video - I'd just select the area, snapshot it - Emacs OCRs the text out of it, which takes milliseconds. I fully control the playback of said video directly from my editor - rewind, pause, mute, speed up, extract transcript, etc. It is enormously liberating and empowering.

I have complete and utter control over text - I can send a query to an LLM in the middle of typing this very comment, without ever missing a beat. I can ask for anything - fact-check it, spell check it, reword it, explain it, give me different variations of the same sentence. I can replace part of it with diffing in-place. I can even start changing the behavior of Emacs itself, right there on the spot.

I can directly grab any part of the log of a process running in the terminal. Grep through it, semantically search through it with an LLM, whatever. Similarly, I can directly grab a piece of any text in Emacs and send it over to another app, e.g., as a command to run in the terminal.

> Everything You describe is possible without emacs

Everything is possible with Turing-complete languages, but Turing-completeness is a trap. It's all about affordability. What Emacs grants as a Lisp-REPL loop with a built-in text editor is lowering that affordability bar to the lowest imaginable minimum.

Have you ever thought: "What if I could change the 'Open File' dialog in Sublime so I can browse GitHub repos directly instead of folders and files?" This kind of thinking has probably never occurred to you - for an Emacs user, that is some prosaic, just-another-Wednesday kind of thought.¹

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¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDn8ak-8yIs

By the way fishing that url out of my browser history took a keystroke - of course Emacs can search through my browser history too - https://github.com/agzam/browser-hist.el