The first editor I used was HomeSite in the mid 1990s. I eventually wanted a more powerful editor. Many programmers recommended Emacs and Vim, but their learnin

The first editor I used was HomeSite in the mid 1990s. I eventually wanted a more powerful editor. Many programmers recommended Emacs and Vim, but their learning curves seemed too steep. I switched from HomeSite to jEdit in the late 1990s because some jEdit users argued that jEdit had the power of Emacs but without the steep learning curve. I used jEdit for a few years, but eventually I needed to program in a language for which there wasn't a good jEdit plugin available. That's when I switched to Emacs. It took me several full days to make the switch, much shorter than I expected it would, but I was far more experienced at that point than I was when I first heard of Emacs. I wish I had switched to Emacs sooner, mostly because of Org mode, which has changed my life. Even if I were to start using an IDE because of a job requirement or whatever, I would still use Emacs for knowledge management. FYI, I don't code in Java, and many people who do prefer IDEs, even some Emacs users.