[lotw_dot_site]

Isn't the reason why people gravitate to standard utilities such as emacs and vim largely because they simply can't cope with all of the shiny graphical bloat while they are trying to wrack their brains coming up with some new kind of thing or another? I use vim, and I've spent countless hours of my life trying to write a new kind of vim with it. (See: https://lotw.site/shell, then enter "import fs && vim" at the prompt.)

[umanwizard]

Modern GNU Emacs isn't really comparable to vim in this respect, since people use it with tons of bells and whistles. Emacs is probably better described as a "framework for building custom IDEs" than as a "text editor". Yes, vim plugins exist but my impression is that using stock vim with no plugins and only a bit of configuration is much more mainstream than doing a similar thing with emacs.

I'm sure people are out there who just use stock emacs, but I'm not sure why you would do so instead of using something simple like nano.

[lotw_dot_site]

I've actually managed to make nano look even simpler, by getting rid of all the interface elements except for a vim-like cursor position indicator in the bottom right. The notes to do it are here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BJeBc0mynxR8lrL4u20q4oBc8vQ.... It wouldn't take too much effort do make it a .diff to auto patch the source code. My main issue with nano is its liberal usage of eye-blinding reverse video.

But I am just so utterly addicted to vim's undo/redo that I always feel naked without it at my fingertips!

And yes, emacs is definitely a universe unto its own. The point is that as a standard command line utility, the option to use it as a bare bones text editor is always readily available to end users, without need to do very much digging into things like settings/hamburger menus. I'm sure there are many emacs gurus "at the ready" in order to answer any conceivable unanswered question about emacs posted to stackoverflow.

[_ph_]

I don't mind a good IDE. But that only "works" well, as long as you are working in one single language, day in and out. There have been such times in my life and I was happy with the corresponding IDE (unless it itself was just crap :p). But if you are not so focussed, jumping between languages quicker, or just if you don't have a good IDE at hand for your language, Emacs is your friend :).

[medstrom]

These days there is the similarly general-purpose VSCode and competitors, so this particular angle holds no water.

[_ph_]

Sorry, first you should consider your language. "Holds no water" is way to strong, especially as it is absolutely wrong. VSCode is nice but a far cry from the abilities of Emacs. And while it does somewhat support a lot of languages, setting it up for a new language is way more work implementing a complex protocol compared to Emacs.

Maybe it has become better, but for a while I looked into it as it was popular for Go editing. Unfortunately, there is way to much predetermined flow built in, so Emacs makes it the way better Go editor for me. Back then, there was even no key binding for compiling the current file.

And as I said, the language coverage is much worse than Emacs, as it is its hackability.

[comfypotato]

To set the tone of my reply: I’m an every-day-all-day Emacs user. I greatly enjoy configuring my Emacs. Your point about “hackability” is spot on. That being said, I think the language “holds no water” is reasonable here. It sounds like you haven’t used VSCode in a while. (As a lightweight IDE) it has completely seamless integration with every popular language.

[DMell]

I’ve never had an issue working with multiple languages in IntelliJ.