I have. I had used various IDEs, from Turbo Pascal over Borland C++ and Visuaol Basic, the last being jBuilder. When Borland refused to give me an upgrade deal

I have. I had used various IDEs, from Turbo Pascal over Borland C++ and Visuaol Basic, the last being jBuilder. When Borland refused to give me an upgrade deal to the next version after I had bought jBuilder 1.0, I had enough anger to really dig into emacs and to learn to use it and the back then really great JDE package for Java development. Since then I have mostly stuck to Emacs for my coding. Sometimes I still would use an IDE, for Java coding you really can't avoid intelliJ :), but most of the time it is just Emacs. Once you have the keybindings in your brain, you will struggle with other editors. And the main advantage of Emacs for me is: I can edit really everything editable, and will find a nice environment. Most IDEs are limited one or few languages and outside of that, you are out of luck. Having support for everything I edit and seamlessly between languages, many of which don't have "IDEs", ist hard to beat. I avoid Java these days, but take SLIME as a really great Common Lisp IDE, or from quite early on good Go support, and many more. And in all of the modes, C-c C-c will either compile the file or evaluate the function under the cursor. And I can edit all those languages not only with the same tool, but within the same session. In one Emacs, you can edit them all side-by-side.