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by gnuvince 935 days ago
- I use Emacs every day as my primary (and only) programming text editor.

- Having nearly 20 years of experience using Emacs, it's just a totally natural fit for me.

- I program primarily in Rust. I use the built-in LSP client, eglot, to communicate with rust-analyzer and have IDE features such as jump-to-def, find-refs, find-impls, auto-import, auto-format, semantic rename, etc. It works just as well as VSCode/Codium (which I tried for about a week to make sure I wasn't missing out; I wasn't.) I also do the odd shell script, Python script, YAML config, Dockerfile, etc. for which Emacs is also well-suited.

- As far as I know, I'm the only person in the company using Emacs. There's a few vim/neovim users, but the vast majority of people are using VSCode. Having paired with many, I don't think that I'm slower for using Emacs; in fact, I think that I am in many cases faster because I am so familiar with the text operations that I don't even think about them, I just do them.

- Overall, I don't see any reason for me to switch away from Emacs at the moment, especially since LSP really blurred the distinction between "text editor" and "IDE".

- I typically don't recommend that programmers try Emacs if they're not already familiar with it. Partly because I don't want them to ask me questions, but mostly because their natural tendency is to try and reproduce their VSCode/JetBrains/Visual Studio workflow. This usually causes frustration, because the way to use Emacs effectively is different from the way to use a product like VSCode that aims to have a good out-of-the-box experience.