I don't think your analogy holds up. If you race an F1 car alongside a commuter sedan, it is obvious to anyone observing the differences in performance, handlin

I don't think your analogy holds up. If you race an F1 car alongside a commuter sedan, it is obvious to anyone observing the differences in performance, handling, traction, etc. So going by results, if emacs was so awesome and if it gave such a huge boost, then we would see those results, and it would be trivial to convince anyone to switch to it. Personally, I don't see editing text as a bottleneck for developer productivity. The vast majority of time is spent reading code, thinking about code, stepping through/debugging code, reading specs, etc. Yes, emacs can do those things to (as can any system that supports plugins), but my point is that we don't see a 'competitive edge' where all the most productive developers use X. What we see is productive developers using a wide variety of tools. Going back to your F1 analogy, there isn't a single sedan winning F1 races.