It seems a lot of people have used emacs for years and love it. I never saw the point of learning as it seemed cryptic. In 2020 is it worth putting the effort to learn now? I figure with vim and IDEs I dont really need it.
I switched to emacs in 2019 after using primarily vim for 12 years, and I think it's more than worth it. It's not an editor, it's not an IDE, it is kind of like an operating system where you can have a text editor, debugger, notes, mail, whatever you want. If you dig that, you'll love emacs. It's extensible in a way you've probably not experienced anywhere else, so if you like honing your tools so they fit the way you want to work, emacs is for you. I've actually come to long for an operating system that gives me the same "interactivity" as emacs does.
- Chat over Slack/$whatever proto is designed in Elisp
- Write Interactive Fiction
- Emulate Interactive fiction with a Z machine in Elisp
- Write and read emails/news with GNUs
- Listen to music with EMMS
- M-x doctor because is too complex and you need to talk to someone
- Comment on HN with eww
- Do literate programming
- Do math, and with Maxima/R, algebra/statistics/whatever
- Use GIT with Magit
- org-mode. With this you could write three ebooks larger than the Java specs.
- org-babel. I forgot it. This is damn magic. Programming as if you were in a word processor, going back and forth, easily, showing up your results inline.
I particularly like calc mode. Top notch programmable rpn calculator with basic CAS support. Good for most algebraic transformations plus derivatives and integrals. It also supports graphing!
Also you missed that you can run WebKit inside of emacs. Also you embed X apps in emacs and use it as a window manager.
I see it as an investment, since it will probably outlive me and anything an IDE can do, _technically_, can be done in emacs.
I was previously a vim user and I wanted to extend my editor but I really hate vimscript. I took a look at Emacs's Elisp and I liked it. To my surprise, the ecosystem was updated with my current tech stack (TypeScript, with the Tide plugin). I was really used to vim so I decided to create my own 'distro' and I began recreating some vim editing functionality along with similar keys (Since I'm not using evil mode or anything, I just made a prefix with Ctrl).
At the end I realized I only liked vim because of its ubiquity and keymaps.
As a big emacs guy, I say it's only worth putting in the effort if you really enjoy the process of crafting a tool that fits the shape of your mind and bending your mind to fit the shape a tool. I personally get a lot of pleasure out of improving my text editor, but I don't think most people will/do.
Depending on your choice of IDE and your proficiency with vim I think the efficiency gains you'd get from switching to emacs will be relatively slight.
