In another in a seemingly unending sequence of such questions, sav-tech, over at the Emacs subreddit asks if Emacs is useful in practical life. I’m not sure what he thinks all we Emacs users are doing if it’s not practical but let’s take his question as being in good faith.
As usual, all the action is in the comments. The main thing that I noticed is that people using VS Code and the like always say that it does what they need right now. That’s because those editors are configured to provide the conventional services. It’s great. There’s no setup required, you just start using it to do what you need to do.
The problem is what comes next. Sooner or later you’re going to need to do something that the VS Code developers didn’t consider and you’re going to be out of luck. With Emacs, you’re also going to find yourself wanting to do something the developers hadn’t anticipated. The difference is that with Emacs you can simply add the capability. Often this doesn’t require anything more than a keyboard macro or some shortcut configurations. If you learn a little Elisp, you can make Emacs do anything you want.
Sav-tech says that someone on Discord told him that Emacs is a monolithic editor, takes only 20–40 minutes to learn, and, anyway everyone is using VS Code now. That’s a fact free statement by someone who has no idea what he’s talking about. Read the comments if you want your faith in the judgment of software engineers restored.
You can use Emacs, VS Code, or whatever works best for you but let’s at least try to keep the discussion informed.