> So all things considered, what value does Emacs bring me?
The value in emacs is all the language specific modes and utilities that will allow you to turn emacs into a customizable IDE where you can run your builds, tests and debuggers from inside the editor.
There are "proper" IDEs out there but all of them are more or less language specific. Emacs is a general purpose text editor and can be used with any language, and customized to the tools and conventions around that language.
I use so many tools and languages that having a single language IDE (or many of them) is not an option. And I don't want to go back to running a simple text editor and running my builds on the command line separately.
I've been a Vim user for quite a long time but I'm slowly making the transition to emacs and evil-mode (I recently started doing some symbolic math Scheme code in emacs). Vim is a great editor but tool integration is the weak spot. Especially debuggers don't really play nice with Vim.
The value in emacs is all the language specific modes and utilities that will allow you to turn emacs into a customizable IDE where you can run your builds, tests and debuggers from inside the editor.
There are "proper" IDEs out there but all of them are more or less language specific. Emacs is a general purpose text editor and can be used with any language, and customized to the tools and conventions around that language.
I use so many tools and languages that having a single language IDE (or many of them) is not an option. And I don't want to go back to running a simple text editor and running my builds on the command line separately.
I've been a Vim user for quite a long time but I'm slowly making the transition to emacs and evil-mode (I recently started doing some symbolic math Scheme code in emacs). Vim is a great editor but tool integration is the weak spot. Especially debuggers don't really play nice with Vim.