(I'm guessing the author means VS Code, not MS Word here?)
There are some features of Emacs that are amazingly useful, have been there for years (or decades), but which I haven't yet managed to find in any other editor. For example, regional undo: select a region of text and step back through changes in that region only.
The author might mean MS Word. I definitely had this thought about a lot of software of all kinds, not just editors/IDEs. The two the author highlighted - view-lossage and describe-key, are to answer the questions "what sequence of keys/operations I've just performed?", and "what does this key/key sequence do, here, in this context?".
The former is useful if you e.g. mistype or type at a wrong moment, invoking some random actions in the program, and now you're wondering what exactly did you do. Also, since it's Emacs, there's actually a quick way to turn lossage into a keyboard macro and clean it up - so if you figured you want to repeat some sequence of operations after you've already done it once, you don't have to record it from scratch.
describe-key approximation exists in some software, typically via the "keyboard binding" preferences dialog containing a textbox for looking up commands by assigned keyboard shortcut. Alas, besides being a worse UX, this will only show you global assignments (or, sometimes, divided by categories). describe-key excels by showing you context-aware help, i.e. it literally tells you what command will be invoked if you press a given key sequence exactly where you are right now.
I just assumed that you were comparing coding environments, but now I come to think about it, something like view-lossage could be really useful for a WYSIWYG editor.
vscode or msword.. doesn't really matter in a way, any keyboard heavy application could give users the history of keypressed, it's natural and often useful
tiny side note, word used to have inline macro tags (dos version 6 IIRC), so one could type
{ if YEAR > 1987 } text { end if }
it was straighforward, and now replaced by GUI heavy systems, user interaction has regressed in a way
Is that from a package?
Really nice when you made changes elsewhere and realize late that you made a mistake (but not too late: the undo info must still be present of course).
I took that to mean that the author painted all non-emacs editors as not really being useful editors.
The article discussed the option of throwing 40 years of development out the window or borrowing/imitating things from emacs/vim. Then the MS Word comment was made, "It never ceases to amaze me that MS Word and its ilk do not seem to have equivalents of ..."
> The article discussed the option of throwing 40 years of development out the window or borrowing/imitating things from emacs/vim.
The article says that even in a 40 y.o. piece of software such as emacs, low-hanging fruits can be found; and thus, that people writing new editors should take inspiration from features from vim/emacs when creating their own, and stand on the shoulders of 40 years of incremental improvements.
Then, as an aside, he remarks that he's surprised that MS Word has not borrowed the lossage feature from emacs – with which I agree: when I accidentally hit keys and break a document, it would be useful to know which key I hit, and which functions I triggered.