Half my fifteen-person team at work (in a fast-growing mid-size fintech company in Chicago) uses Emacs, for editing/testing/running code in several languages, i

Half my fifteen-person team at work (in a fast-growing mid-size fintech company in Chicago) uses Emacs, for editing/testing/running code in several languages, interacting with Web services, running various shells, calendar functions, document writing including UML diagrams and mathematics typesetting, and personal planning (Org Mode). To do this, we collectively probably use about 0.1% of the publicly available extension packages for Emacs on MELPA. But the short summary is that most people use it for the various functions an IDE provides. The major difference between Emcs and other IDEs (VSCode, IntelliJ, ...) is that (a) it's often a little harder to get functionality that is provided out-of-the-box by another IDE, but (b) it's much easier (in some cases, infinitely easier) to implement workflows or functionality not already implemented by said IDE. As an example, I often run snippets of code and want to insert the result directly beneath the code in question (similar to Jupyter in Python, but for any language, in plain text, directly in my editor). A trivial amount of Emacs Lisp gave me that with minimal effort. If you like to have nearly absolute control of your editing experience, Emacs might be interesting to you. For most people starting out, who just want to get hacking on some code as quickly as possible, it is perhaps not the best fit.