[nazri1]

The thing is an IDE can only do so much - depending solely on the IDE mean your ability to change/refactor the code is limited to exactly what the IDE gives you. If you need to do something that the IDE can't do for you then you're stuck. This is when being competent in Vim/Emacs/Shell is an advantage.

[szastupov]

But you can extend IDEs just as well as you extend your vim/emacs. Not to mention, that for some users it's more convenient to hack extensions in Python (Sublime), Javascript/Coffee (Atom) or Typescript (vscode), rather than in weird dialect of lisp (lisp is cool, I encourage everyone to go and read SICP, but not elisp) or even worse, vim script.

[gkya]

Elisp is a good lisp. Certainly not the best, but quite workable, and very pleasing when the environment it's in is taken into account. Emacs is open source, has better apps than Sublime,not a web page like atom and not code centric like vs code. But maybe sublime and atom could provide a similar environment as they have the tools to create parallel ones. Butnothing like org and gnus exist elsewhere, unfortunately.

[pleasecalllater]

Could you tell me what was the last problem you had that an IDE couldn't do, and vim/emacs could?

[to3m]

This happens to me in these main day-to-day cases, comparing Emacs to Visual Studio and Xcode:

- VS/Xcode don't support keyboard macros

- VS/Xcode don't support piping selection through a shell command (I had to write an addin to do it: https://github.com/tom-seddon/VSScripts)

More generally, your window layout options in both are a lot more limited, and, worst of all, the extensibility experience in both is poor. Extensibility is basically non-existent in Xcode, and while it looks comprehensive in VS the APIs are rather unwieldy and underdocumented and the iteration time for testing is very bad.

Good extensibility support opens up many possibilities! Even with what VS gives you, you can get good stuff like Comment Reflower, or (if I say so myself) my VSScripts addin. But Emacs just does that side of things a lot better.

For example, multiple-cursors.el, which is an Emacs addon, is a huge improvement over the box selection available in VS/Xcode.

Adding reasonable support for a language to Emacs is easy to do in a couple of hours, possibly working from one of the many examples, and you can continue refining it from there. In VS by contrast options are the two extremes of "pretend it's one of the other languages VS supports already" (little better than Notepad with syntax highlighting) or "invest a week (plus) in writing an entire new language infrastructure, with no examples to work from" (I'm sure the results are good if you put the effort in though). For most under-supported languages you'll meet, Emacs is much closer to the effort/reward sweet spot.

(Xcode? I don't think you can make it support new languages at all.)

It's been a while since I used WebStorm (Javascript-oriented IDE) but my response to that was similar.

[kazinator]

Edit a file on an ARM board, where the flash filesystem is less than 100 megs.

[dcousens]

Easy. Vim doesn't get in my way.

[lghh]

What do you mean by this?

[kazinator]

Probably that you actually get out of Vim when you're not editing anything, so it's not running at all.