Maybe you just haven’t found a killer feature for you yet that blew you away. Personally, I also can’t give you THE one use case that sold me on Emacs. It’s mor

Maybe you just haven’t found a killer feature for you yet that blew you away. Personally, I also can’t give you THE one use case that sold me on Emacs. It’s more the integration of a diverse set of tools together with its robustness that really makes it shine. I have used vanilla Emacs for a long time with only a couple of packages installed (basically flyspell and web-mode) and everything worked for me although it was quite boring. That’s because I managed most of my dev workflow outside of Emacs. The JS dev server took care of reloading and transpiling, the linter ran as a test step and I used git on the command line for version management. These days I do a lot of backend work, most importantly REST APIs. So have to tweak server code, restart the server (not always written in JS), test out new end points. So I am using the built-in „compile mode“ running a bash script automatically deploying my code changes using ssh upon two key strokes (C-c C-r). Emacs returns syntax errors including file names and lines, so I can jump straight into the code to fix the issue. Once running I switch over to a „restclient.el“ session to try my code. With another two key strokes (C-c C-c) I execute a request (however complicated) and receive the JSON response in a temporary side buffer which I can filter using „jq“ with another key stroke thanks to restclient-jq.el. I can inspect runtime errors on the server by opening the remote log file using TRAMP mode (alternatively, I open a „term“ session and invoke „tail -f“). Once the code works I press „C-x g“ to switch over to „magit“ to stage or commit my changes. If I have to work on two or three things in parallel I use „perspective.el“ to maintain something akin to virtual desktops, so I don’t have to re-order my buffers all the time. I also do teaching on REST APIs which I do using „org-mode“ together with „org-babel“ and „org-tree-slide“ allowing to inline actual restclient.el sessions among text or graphical slides. I also use org-mode for technical documentation including executable code and for explorational SQL development. You see, in Emacs many packages just glue together seamlessly thanks to its brilliant API that stood the test of times. I didn’t start using all of this on a single day but Emacs sucked me into its eco system very slowly until I just couldn’t imagine using anything else anymore. It just takes time to get to know these things and getting comfortable with Emacs‘ configuration system.