[claystu]

>What do the graphical environments gain you

Simplicity. In my IDE, I start it up and then program.

With emacs, it always felt like I spent a lot of time curating the editor. Part of that was because customizing emacs is fun--I have this big .emacs file that imports an even bigger .elisp file--but I also always seemed to be referring to some documentation because I'd forgotten that particular set of key-chords or messing with something to get it to work.

I've come to prefer simplicity. In fact, after years of using emacs, I switched to vim for the moments when I want to program on the command line. (I think my only customization in VIM is mapping jj to escape)

[noobermin]

In case this helps anyone else, I've found that a better shortcut for me is Ctrl+[ , which actually maps to escape too. I too found having to tap escape to exit modes was annoying since I had to make my fingers leave the home row and there is no need to customize mapping in this case.

If you're used to hitting ctrl with your left pinky, which is necessary for us emacsers, then Ctrl+[ will be 100x better than hitting escape.

[Roboprog]

I like IntelliJ, but I still spend time here and there window-shopping the settings and plugins. That seems to be the nature of things, regardless of the tool.