Dominik Tarnowski gives us 15 reasons to use Emacs and says that VS Code has nothing on Emacs. He’s a Doom Emacs user but everything he says other than the particular keystrokes apply to any flavor. Another possible title for his post would have been Emacs’ Killer Apps because most of the post is about those killer apps. People can differ on what the Emacs killer apps are but pretty much everyone agrees that Org-mode and Magit are on the list.
Most of the post is devoted to Org-mode and a small amount of Magit. He’s got animated GIFS to illustrate many of points he makes so it’s pretty easy to follow along. Rather than reiterating Tarnowski’s list of outstanding Emacs features, I’ll let you check out the post yourselves.
I disagree with his conclusion that “…Emacs out of the box is simply bad.” What he probably means is something like “it doesn’t look modern enough” but vanilla Emacs is powerful out of the box with a lot of functionality already there. To be sure, most users will add packages for even more functionality but I live happily with the default Emacs look other than changing the white background to “oldlace” (a very light tan) to make the contrast a bit easier on my eyes. Of course, if bling is important to you, Emacs can do that too. As always, it lets you have it your way.