I say this as an IDE guy (I use Qt Creator, VS and Eclipse at work all day and PyCharm for my quick hacks). I've been picking up some emacs here and there, ther

I say this as an IDE guy (I use Qt Creator, VS and Eclipse at work all day and PyCharm for my quick hacks). I've been picking up some emacs here and there, there are a few huge advantages to something like emacs over a typical IDE: - You can just live in it. You don't have to leave. I watch TV using dired to run mpv and use org-mode for my todo list. It's all right there. - Once you get used to one set of keyboard shortcuts, you can harness an enormous amount of power throughout the whole environment. This is true in some IDEs too, but IDEs don't usually offer - Rust. Rust is actually one of the main reasons I started picking up some Emacs. There are no good Rust IDEs. There's crappy VS and Eclipse plugins. There's Atom plugins, but Atom freezes randomly when running code with Cargo and the DPI scaling still doesn't work properly on Windows. SublimeText was the only thing I could find that worked, and while it worked I wasn't willing to commit $70 to buying a text editor. Then I tried Emacs and it works absolutely beautifully. - Emacs has really take advantage of the GUI paradigm too, check out the minimap: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MiniMap https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MiniMap It's not just some outdated console application that no one uses anymore. - You don't need a different IDE for when you're writing python vs C++ vs Javascript. There's no switching. Just open whatever you want in that permanent emacs session you have running. - Most if not all IDE features are actually available easily via plugins, yes, there's a little configuration involved but most of the time it's not too bad. And I'm a tinkerer so I really don't mind. Overall, IDEs are great if you just want to sit down and code without the tinkering. But if you're willing to put the work in, I think you can get much more comfortable in something like Emacs where you have deep flexibility and access to most (if not all) of the same features once they're set up. I can definitely see the appeal. Especially of really unique stuff like org-mode that you just can't get anywhere else.