The most important advantage of Emacs and vi are, these are open systems, which come out of an open culture, not just "open source" but really free software, wi

The most important advantage of Emacs and vi are, these are open systems, which come out of an open culture, not just "open source" but really free software, with no strings attached. Granted, open source is having its successes, so companies are trying to jump onto that bandwagon, but this has mainly the consequence that the strings attached are less visible - like "telemetrics", inacceptable spyware, waste of attention, artificial obstacles to competitor languages / systems, unwarranted and empty hype, and so on. It is important to recognize the tone of that, and to listen to it, and to think about it, because it can warn you before making bad decisions. Also, Emacs has top-notch documentation. While basic commands are not that hard to learn, there is certainly a lot of stuff one can learn, so much that it takes some amount of conscious effort to learn a good fraction of what is relevant to certain tasks. That said, Emacs also makes fantastic use of a undervalued property of the human brain, which is automatic decluttering, forgotting and blending out things which are not in use, like a diligent and friendly housemaid which brings anything which you haven't really used in the last year into the attic ;-) But, jokes aside, exactly like learning the Linux command line well, learning some Emacs is an /excellent/ use of ones time as a programmer, because the half-life time of the knowledge you gather is much much longer than when you just learn the latest IDE. Chances are that your IDE du jour will be mostly forgotten five or six years from now. Chances are high that the basic command-line tools and Emacs commands you learn now will still be useful twenty and thirty years from now.