I really like emacs and use it whenever I can. I wish the community of emacs users and contributors was larger, but emacs is so clunky out of the box it's really hard to onboard new people.
The thing is that the “accessible” environments like VSCode are getting really good. Ten or twenty years ago you couldn’t really move serious code around fast without knowing vi or emacs (ideally both).
emacs is still mandatory if you want to go crazy fast, but the people who reply “challenge accepted” always seem to find their way to it.
I recommend getting crazy fast for a number of reasons (separate conversation), but it’s no longer obvious that the non-emacs/non-vi folks are handicapping themselves gratuitously.
It just makes sense. And once you get used to it, it feels so much more smooth to operate on textual data than with something more "point-and-click, modern-user-friendly" like VS Code. Especially after you learn enough to know how you want to start customizing it to bend to your whim.
But when I look at some emacs power users on YT, my feeling is that they type fast because they know shortcuts for every single kind of edit they want to make. Is memorizing dozens of shortcuts the way to be crazy fast ? OR is it something else ?
- marginalia/vertico; those really help.
- ability to open pictures in the editor
- ability to reformat text paragraphs
- (for my own use caes), R integration is really nice
- super configurable
Everything text related is a joy once navigation and using emacs is purely muscle memory.