| 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. |