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I think it's as simple as: Emacs is like VS Code, IntelliJ is like Visual Studio.

JetBrains makes great IDEs, and you should use them if you're working on a large project that one of those IDEs is geared towards. It'd take a lot of work to get any other editor to have the same feature-set and organization of workspace.

Emacs is a general-purpose environment for writing, and you should use it if you want a specific flow for writing code, or anything else. You can setup plugins so that it's like a mini IDE for most of the languages you write in, and you can setup plugins to modify the organization of your workspace. You want tabs? Add them. You want a tree view of your current project folder? Add one. You want Vim-style editing? Enable it. Etc.

Right now it seems everyone is looking for a code editor that is extensible and fast - Emacs fits that bill better than VS Code (also Neovim might end up being even better!), but it's more difficult to get it right. That's why there are projects like Spacemacs and Doom Emacs to make adding/removing plugins easier, and also have a good setup out of the box.




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