[joshuaellinger]

1. Nothing I've found comes anywhere close to Emacs support for keyboard macros. Zero latency to record. Records every keystroke. Very very consistent behavior. Infinite undo. Kill Ring. Register support.

Despite being an expert Emacs user, I'm mostly in VS Code these days because it has syntax highlighting, git support, and linting out of the the box. But I always go back to Emacs when I need to transform a bit of text.

2. Comparing two text snippets, as opposed to files.

There are a small set of use cases where you want to look at every position where something has changed. You can open two buffers in Emacs and use compare-windows to walk through them. Since the IDEs are all file-oriented, they don't work for this case well.

[smt88]

What are some examples of keyboard macros you use? I read a lot about people loving keyboard macros, but I can honestly say I've never thought of a use-case for them. There's already a built-in IDE automation for everything I could think to do with a macro.

[trocado]

If you have, say, a list on consecutive lines with a blank line in between them, and you want to delete a character after the second word, add some text at the end, and delete the blank line - with keyboard macros you record these transformations once and then apply them to the rest of the items.