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I'm an emacs evangelist and I'll use Eclipse or IntelliJ for Java. I have half a mind to just use a windows VM for visual studio because I think it's a great Python IDE.

But then there's everything else.

I've looked a great deal for a decent javascript IDE and I have yet to find one outside of Emacs. For a lot of languages I end up using in short spurts, I appreciate having a text editor that can do what I need it to do, and can do it consistently regardless of what I throw at it.

If I have boilerplate that I need to set up, building a yasnippet template is a piece of cake. If I need syntax highlighting, it's almost guaranteed that someone has gone down that road and has a mode already set up. If I need to migrate to a new machine, I pull in my .emacs from my git repo.

Little things that might be a challenge - like opening a file over SSH or needing kerberos authentication in order to edit a file - are challenges that have long since been dealt with.

There were two videos that brought me back to Emacs after years of using other editors - one was about python development in Emacs when I was looking for a python IDE, the other was a video about org-mode.

It took me two weeks of forcing myself to use Emacs before the muscle memory came back and I started preferring Emacs over vi again.

I wouldn't be too concerned about whether or not you should migrate to it. Use what you know. When you have a need for the power of emacs, you can safely ignore it the first five or ten times it pops up.

Eventually, you'll wander into a video how-to like I did and turn to the dark side. Or not.




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