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Emacs user here. I have used lot's of IDE's in the past until I decided to take Emacs seriously. The problem with IDE's is that you have to learn one for each language. Working on multi-language projects becomes really annoying. With Emacs I can remain in the same place. If I spend a little bit configuring it I get most of the IDE features. I am always at home. Git is there too. Now I even check my email there, great for emailing about technical stuff. Muscle memory works until it is almost part of yourself.

A couple of things might take a bit more to configure (C++ smartness). But it is a free software program that has been around like 30 years. I am confident it is a tool I can invest in and it won't let me down. I can not say the same about proprietary IDE's and editors.

Sounds reasonable, you're basically investing in an ecosystem that trades flexibility for polish.

However, I have to point something out which proved to be an eye-opener for some people I've discussed the second point you bring up:

> But it is a free software program that has been around like 30 years. I am confident it is a tool I can invest in and it won't let me down. I can not say the same about proprietary IDE's and editors.

This argument is a bit dated, I think it harks back to the days of Borland IDEs and the Halloween Papers for Microsoft.

Why do I think it's a bit dated:

1. Quite a few of the commercial IDEs are not fully proprietary anymore, for example the core of the Jetbrains IDEs is Open Source; Visual Studio is proprietary but large parts of what it offered have been split into external components which are Open Source, more precisely Roslyn; I'll grant you XCode, but at that point you know you're locking yourself into the proprietary Apple ecosystem anyway; the other major IDEs are actually fully Open Source: Eclipse, Netbeans, Visual Studio Code, Atom

2. The Cathedral and the Bazaar predictions kind of failed ... Open Source didn't take over the world; it carved a segment in the market, a huge one, but still, a segment; proprietary software adjusted and now both coexist in various combinations in between Free Software and fully proprietary software. Both FOSS and commercial projects and products have to please their "clients". They do that, or they die. So the commercial side is in my opinion a lot more flexible than it used to be.

3. The software market is way more mature than it was when the GNU propaganda machine and later the Eric Raymond Open Source-hype machine were fully operational (with IBM backing it) - I'm only half joking about the FSF/Open Source propaganda, we have to acknowledge it for what it was and we aware of it , even if we consider its goals as noble; anyway, just because software vendors were dying like flies back in the 80's and 90's, it doesn't mean that mature software companies today will suffer the same fate. They might be somewhat fickle, and yes, even big companies can go bankrupt, but let's not discuss hypotheticals, let's discuss based on actual data:

* Visual Studio was launched in 1997, 21 (!) years ago; Visual Basic was launched in 1991, 27 (!) years ago; I know that Visual Basic didn't transition cleanly to Visual Studio, my point is that many principles from the Visual Basic IDE applied to Visual Studio

* Netbeans was launched in 1996, 22 years ago

* IntelliJ IDEA was launched in 2001, 17 years ago

* Eclipse was launched in 2001

My point is that was impressive to say "Emacs was launched 20 years ago" back in 1999, when the oldest mainstream IDE was 7-8 years old and you had common failures of companies selling IDEs (therefore losing support). However in 2018, as I said, this is a bit dated.

Many a Visual Studio developer have fed their family by using this tool from Microsoft over more than 2 decades. Same for Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ. I suspect Visual Studio Code and maybe even Atom will follow this trajectory.

So let's stop this FUD, please. Looking at my arguments, I think you can agree with me that based on the data we have, a Visual Studio developer can probably retire successfully in 2040 while still using Visual Studio. And Visual Studio is "risky" because it's majority proprietary. But Eclipse, for example, is fully Open Source, backed by an organization, etc.

I see your arguments as a meld of two separate ones:

1. Very good IDEs — which may be proprietary — do exist and have existed for a while (the Visual Studio argument); and

2. Free Software IDEs do exist and have existed for a while (the Eclipse argument).

However, neither Visual Studio nor Eclipse on its own fulfills both arguments. I think your parent was trying to say that their customized install of Emacs does.

As for the point about people being able to make a living off of an IDE for two decades ... well, that's a low bar, isn't it? Lots of people make a living off of no IDEs (the Vim argument) for decades. The argument wasn't really about acceptably good IDEs for the general public, rather about IDEs sufficiently good to the parent's standards. Something they can invest in and reap rewards off of instead of merely using it, thus implying a higher standard than just "does the job".

JetBrains IDEs work pretty well as a polyglot system. I do like the language-differentiated IDEs they have since they streamline the interface a bit to what's relevant, but most (if not all) of them are implemented as plugins to IntelliJ too. It's comparable to language-specific Emacs distros vs. modes.

I've taken up learning emacs again via spacemacs so I can have an editor with console and gui modes. The increased discover-ability has helped me a lot. But what facets of emacs proved valuable after learning them?

To keep it brief (mobile keyboards suck): Vim’s strong suit is editing text. That’s all.

But, and it’s a big but, that’s enough. As a vim user, I have the rest of the shell and browsers for the rest of my development environment. Version control: git. Building and testing tools: make (or similar). Debugging: gdb, pdb, the browsers debugger.

Lots of single purpose tools that operate cleanly and so integrate into my personal workflow easily. Every time I’ve picked up an ide, I’ve been disappointed by the compromises which were made to make it “integrated”.

vi is unixy, in the sense of UNIX is supposed to be the "interpreter" or the IDE as some books said. vi let's you type a few keys and delegate to whoever is most capable of dealing with it. I'd love it if I was stronger with C and interprocess comms. My mind naturally wants everything into one core which is very lispy, so emacs suited me best at first.

It's quite true, IDE value is prepackaged, programmable editor value is flexibility. Both come with issues. Eclipse (because of Java culture mostly) is hell in resources and programmability. Emacs is seriously amazing here, but yeah I don't have a full fledged debugger out of the box. That said .. it only takes one guy to make it so. Just look at magit.. so far it's one of, if not the, best git interface.

The thing with Emacs and Vim is that I like polish. I like to tinker, but I like to know that if I need something people have banged their heads against the wall with the same tools and fixed them. With plugins and just hobbyists working on the plugins (or professionals only doing thing in their spare time) it's hard to get the level of polish high enough.

I'm a bit sad that Emacs kind of failed as a commercial IDE. Note: commercial, not proprietary. Free Software can be commercial. I guess it's because GNU never got into the second wave of UX that popped up basically in the early 90's.

Emacs badly needed something like a successful Lucid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_Inc.

That Lucid company would have had to push for UX features for all kinds of programmers, for a set of blessed extensions that are tested together, for proper documentation with modern terminology, for sane, modern defaults, etc. You know, turn a software project into a software product. Imagine Sublime Text levels of polish, but with the power of Emacs.

I lost the desire to tinker. Even well known and easy to install theming... I go vanilla.

Why I stick to emacs: light compared to most advanced editors. elisp.

If I ever need something I know I can, if someone didn't do it already, add it to emacs. When you crossed that line, it's very hard to feel stuck and unable to eval a few lines to improve your workflow.

The whole point of emacs is that it is extensible, and easily so. That is the core thing that makes emacs great. And it means that, far from having extensions that are inferior to those on IDEs, it has many extensions that are far, far superior to the IDE equivalents. For example, magit I find a far superior git extension than the IDE equivalents. Something like org-mode simply has no rival in the world of IDEs, it is an incredibly powerful and flexible tool which contains all my notes and integrates well with "languages" even.

Or look at macro support. IDEs still have either non-existent, or comparatively poor macro support, which I consider vital. The amount of times as a developer I have to do some repetitive task, or worse, some semi-repetitive but needs a bit of intelligence here and there task, which can be accomplished using a macro with a bit of logic, is insane.

Emacs really is like a superset of IDEs. It does a whole lot of things that IDEs just don't do as well, and then it also does a bunch of things that IDEs do as well.

That is not to say I don't use IDEs. If I have to do java, I'll do it in intellij. If I have to do nearly anything else, I'll do it in emacs. And luckily, most IDEs seem to come with a set of emacs keybindings and plugins so jumping back and forth isn't even that painful.

For some (a lot of?) things that's true. But at that point you're basically writing your own stuff, just using a framework. You get the flexibility, but you're also "responsible" for making its level match up with that of something someone was probably paid to do (and that someone else is not always incompetent :) ).

Regarding macros, I agree. However in the languages supported by the IDE, I rarely find that I need macros. I use refactorings, which are like macros on steroids, since they understand the actual language.

I really wish there was some modern Open Source editing environment which was extendable easily and also had commercial backing for the key parts. Visual Studio Code is remarkable close to what I want, it seems to have a solid architecture. The fact that it runs on Elecron is a kind of a drawback, but Microsoft really wants to make it competitive and I expect once WebAssembly hits the shelves things could take a very interesting turn.

This => "But at that point you're basically writing your own stuff, just using a framework."

is what makes Emacs so comfortable for me. In fact, that was a moment of revelation when I found that Emacs is not an editor as they said, but a platform to build your editor/IDE/environment. Probably, it is because my brain is trained to think in a programming way, it feels much more natural to tune everything by coding, then by knobs, and buttons. And, yes, it provides more extensibility. I mean, for real. That's why I, as many before me, started to do a lot of things unrelated to programming in Emacs - because I can make it to assist me better, in ways unachievable with other software, in spite of the fact that the latter could be specially developed for a purpose.

I don't proclaim Emacs is the panacea for everything, it has it's ugly sides too. I just want to say if you like to rule you working environment, not just learn how to live with it - Emacs can offer you something.