There are many things that you can do in VSCode and IntelliJ or even Notepad. What most people miss or are completely oblivious to are the unique features of Emacs that are simply not possible anywhere else. Things like:
- Hooks or advising functions, where you can override any built-in or third-party function.
- Indirect buffers that allow you to view the same file through the lens of completely different contexts - imagine editing code comments as if you're writing Markdown.
- Unrivaled keyboard macros that can be saved as Lisp functions, providing flexibility for more advanced macro behavior.
- Integrated shells like Eshell where you can mix traditional shell commands with Lisp functions.
- TRAMP (Transparent Remote Access, Multiple Protocols) to access remote systems via a multitude of protocols, including ssh/scp, ftp, rsh/rcp, smb, even Docker. It eases the work of editing files on remote machines or containers by making them appear as though they are local files.
Emacs has some features that blow your mind and make you ask "But why?" and "Just how?". There's Calc that includes combinatorial functions, probability, statistics, and functions for number theory, conversion between hundreds of different units.
There's a built-in Calendar that knows how to calculate Lunar phases and Sunset and Sunrise based on your location. Can your IDE change its theme based on the time of day? Sure, VSCode has an extension for it. But can you hook into that extension and make it append a comment to every Git commit using info based on a function of that extension? In Emacs, you can do that without having to write another extension.
Don't say what other editors can do better than Emacs or just as good as Emacs. Because Emacs still makes it possible to do in an extremely hackable way that blows everything else out of the water in the hands of an experienced Emacs user.
