[bananamerica]

Vim and Emacs have a bunch of features that you won't find on editors like VS Code. VS Code has some features you won't find on Vim and Emacs.

One of the great advantages of these "old-school" text editors is the extent to which they can be customized. This is even more true about Emacs, which is mainly written in its own "scripting" language. Almost everything on Emacs is exposed to the user during runtime. It's very easy to make both temporary and permanent changes. Emacs is self-documenting: there are handy commands to find keybindings, variables, and functions definitions. If this is not good enough, you can go straight to the source code and redefine whatever you want. You just need to evaluate the code for it to become available at runtime: no reboot necessary. Once you get used to this level of freedom, it's hard to get used to other platforms.

One thing I'd like to point out is that, even though Vim and Emacs are old, this doesn't mean they're stuck in time. They are constantly updated to support all the current technologies that people might associate with newer text editors like Atom and VS Code.