Every five years or so I decide to give whatever editors/IDEs are in vogue a decent shot, to make sure I'm not missing out on anything (better still is to work along side of someone who is really productive in a radically different environment, like acme). Usually I come away from it with a few tweaks to my emacs configuration, but I have yet to be compelled away from emacs.
For example, I gave Visual Studio another shot recently (VS2013); and I mean, I read books on using it productively, I read the various tip blogs, advice for customization online, et cetera; I used it extensively. Unfortunately, I just don't see what people see in it. From my point of view, it's still slow, cumbersome, expensive (for any version with features that are actually useful), much less featureful than (customized) emacs, and doesn't run on most of the platforms I use to develop software. In theory, I could dedicate a few years writing extensions for one of these IDEs to duplicate all the emacs modes I use, but I'd probably never be able to fix, for example, buffer switching, or all the places where the mouse is the preferred form of interaction, or where modal dialogs steal focus (let alone all the dialogs that inexplicably aren't resizable). Meanwhile, the nice features like Intellisense and so on are the kind of customizations I've had in emacs for most of my prefered languages for years anyway.
For example, I gave Visual Studio another shot recently (VS2013); and I mean, I read books on using it productively, I read the various tip blogs, advice for customization online, et cetera; I used it extensively. Unfortunately, I just don't see what people see in it. From my point of view, it's still slow, cumbersome, expensive (for any version with features that are actually useful), much less featureful than (customized) emacs, and doesn't run on most of the platforms I use to develop software. In theory, I could dedicate a few years writing extensions for one of these IDEs to duplicate all the emacs modes I use, but I'd probably never be able to fix, for example, buffer switching, or all the places where the mouse is the preferred form of interaction, or where modal dialogs steal focus (let alone all the dialogs that inexplicably aren't resizable). Meanwhile, the nice features like Intellisense and so on are the kind of customizations I've had in emacs for most of my prefered languages for years anyway.