[chipotle_coyote]

Again, I love emacs and I’m very effective in it with my own configuration, but it’s practically unusable by default.

As someone who has tried to be an Emacs user off and on over the past two decades: "yes, this."

I'm reasonably comfortable in both Vim and Emacs, but the reality is that every time I try to make a move to be a Serious Full-Time (Vim|Emacs) User, I find myself spending days trying to get either editor up to the point I was previously at in Sublime Text or VS Code. And I never make it. Never, never, never. Plugins or modes conflict with one another in non-obvious (to me) ways, and Emacs in particular tends to present a "here are a half-dozen ways to solve your problem, none of which will actually work with your configuration" issue. Meanwhile, everyone and their brother has a New! Amazing! Distribution! of the editor. My last couple of attempts to get into either one led me into a nightmare of "go pure vanilla and painstakingly build things from scratch, even though you don't actually know what the pieces you need are" vs. "start with Evil Awesome Space Prelude Vundle." And then, I can finally install the Elixir plugin! Wait, you also need alchemist.el and web-mode.el and probably need to edit your .emacs, excuse me, init.el, except maybe .spacemacs?, and now choose which of the half-dozen autocompletion systems to use, but OH MY GOD NOT THAT ONE YOU FOOL NOW YOU HAVE TO START OVER

And then I go back to one of those Terrible Awful GUI editors and get work done.

[accatyyc]

Hehe, thanks for the laugh! Yeah, I can totally relate. In fact, to become effective in Emacs I had to start by reading a book (Mastering Emacs, can totally recommend if you ever decide to try again!) and then spending _a lot_ of time fighting configurations. Even now that I’m very comfortable in Emacs I occasionally spend hours to just get a package working correctly (recently it was lsp-mode, which looks like the solution to many problems with Emacs, but I could never get it to work).

So yeah, I can’t really tell you it will be worth it productivity wise to learn Emacs, but for me it has gotten to the point that configuring it is a lot of fun and sort of replaces hobby programming projects for me.

[chipotle_coyote]

I try occasionally because I'm pretty sure that eventually I would get to a place where Emacs would be astounding. (Or Vim, lest any partisans think I haven't given it a shot.) I just so far haven't quite gotten over that hill. But someday.

(Ironically, I spend most of my professional editing time -- which involves writing documentation in Markdown, not coding -- in BBEdit, because while there are a lot of coding editors that do more than it does, it has a few features for text slicing and dicing that I just haven't seen duplicated anywhere else.)