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Comment by alde | Hacker News Reader

Yes, odd. Data point: me and most of my SE friends/coworkers pay for JetBrains IDEs (I was pretty deep into emacs and vim for many years prior to switching).

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I definitely haven't "switched". In fact, I have a key binding for escaping to emacs to work on the current source. I find that useful because emacs kbd macros are so much less clunky than the Jetbrains equivalent. But yes, Jetbrains products have taken over much of what I used to do in emacs.

> I have a key binding for escaping to emacs to work on the current source.

Are you aware that you can set the Jetbrains editor to use emacs key bindings?

Not OP but they're not saying they want to use emacs keybindings, they're saying they want to use emacs keyboard macros [1], which I agree really are a very handy feature having no equivalent in JetBrains.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Ke...

Emacs keyboard macros have an inferior equivalent in Intellij (and, I'm assuming, their other products). But also, emacs just somehow feels faster. Maybe keystrokes are marginally faster, maybe it's my expectations, but there it is.

I know that Intellij has emacs key bindings, that's not the issue, I'm happy with the Intellij default bindings.

Oh, wait, I just figured out part of it.

In Jetbrains products, I am CONSTANTLY hitting Esc to Tab to deal with the helpful predictive suggestion. I find that feature sometimes useful, so I have not turned it off. But it definitely produces a different and maybe slower experience than typing in emacs. Maybe there is a mental mode switch between typing and handling the hint?

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