It was my development tool of choice for decades. And it very much did the job of IDEs better than any IDE. But it no longer does. In part because IDEs became better editors.

I’d love to use Emacs. But it is more work to use it now than just a decade ago.

I would argue that Emacs is more than just programming. I use it for:

- GTD with org-mode

- Git client

- Mails with mu4e

All of it not because I can do it in emacs, but just because it is the most comfortable solution out there: I have used OmniFocus for years before, several git clients and obviously all kind of mail clients, including web abdominations.

Again, Emacs is not an IDE and never was one. I don't know what "a job of IDE" is, but for Java it was certainly never on the the level of Eclipse. The same is true for Python - PyCharm is an IDE, Emacs and VSCode are glorified editors with mediocre hinting.

On the other side, today's development environments are complex and people want them more and more integrated in their editors. Keeping a configuration needed for such an advanced editor across multiple languages is not a trivial task an maybe beyond capabilities of a single person. This is the reason why Emacs distributions exist and are increasingly gaining popularity. I also have more confidence in Doom Emacs and it's team of contributors than in Microsoft.

I used to use Emacs for all of those things and more.

I think I used Emacs as my email client for around 20 years. There was never really any email client that did IMAP well and storing mail locally doesn't work when you have a couple of laptops, two home machines you use for work, a couple of workstations at work. I can't remember which email client I originally used, but over the years there wasn't much left of it since I had rewritten large parts of it to offer tolerable IMAP support that could deal with having 3-4 different accounts for work, personal, hobby etc.

What broke things was when maintaining a mail infrastructure became too much work and I that I had to use services for work that didn't play nice with most mail clients.

And this sucked since I had something like 10kLOC of elisp to deal with sorting, categorizing, prioritizing and filtering email. So I had this specialized email client nobody was willing to touch (can't blame people since the code was probably garbage) and I had a choice between continuing to spend time maintaining it and just use more convenient options.

It depends on what people think when they say IDE.

I would say I used Emacs as an IDE for C, C++, Java and to a certain degree, Go. For me an IDE needs to do syntax highlighting, have some semantic understanding of the language, be able to do sensible completion, understand symbols (find definition, find uses), show me documentation, interface with version control, be able to do simple refactoring, run builds, tests, perform debugging etc. It doesn't matter whether it is a clicky or GUI'y interface - what matters to me is that I can have 90% my needs as a developer served within the same environment.

Or let me put it another way: I don't use VS code for anything I didn't use Emacs for in the past when I develop.

But the thing is that Emacs doesn't have enough active developers maintaining stuff. For instance, if you program Go, things worked okay - and then the semantic bits moved to language servers and Emacs extensions were slow to adopt this. Making Emacs a lot less useful. Every so many weeks you'd sit down a weekend to try to cobble together something that would minimally work and it became tiring.

And yes, a lot of basic stuff is missing or simply just too low quality. From how you configure stuff to how you install and manage extensions to how you manage configuration across workstations. This isn't a new problem and the fact that Emacs has struggled with this for too long suggests that you won't see this solved in, for instance, GNU Emacs any time soon.

If you are a developer today learning VS Code is a better investment than learning Emacs. It has nothing to do with disliking Emacs - it is a simple matter of what environment manages to attract a sufficiently large active developer base for developing extensions and tools.

As I said, I still love Emacs. But evolution is making it a dead end.

>If you are a developer today learning VS Code is a better investment than learning Emacs.

That is something which only time will show. Over the course of my life I've seen several hyped editors and IDE come and completely vanish: TextMate, Sublime, Atom, Eclipse, Netbeans. I have zero confidence that VSCode will still be hot in 10 years, especially given their poor choice of technology to write VSCode in and that MS is the sole driver of the project and can do or throw it out as it pleases.

A new developer is of course free to choose any tool, but in my experience every editor knowledge which is not vim or emacs can be treated as disposable, since it will not pay off in the long term. Thus, I would treat VSCode the same way as an IDE: use it for things which work out of the box and avoid investing time in any kind of fine-tuning. But certainly, if the experience out of the box is sufficient to solve problems, why not use it? An editor is not a religion and more than one or two can be used simultaneously. My "glue" for different editors are vim-keybindings. I use them in Emacs, IDEA and used them in VSCode, when I still had an usecase for it.

I agree that the choice of implementation language was unfortunate.

Which is a statement that is equally valid for VS Code and Emacs, so you get to interpret that any way you like.