What can they do that emacs can't?
They realize that despite the potentially subpar text editing experience, a highly polished modern Integrated Development Environment is a power tool and a productivity machine for the environment it's aimed at.
One simple example, maybe Emacs can do this. Can Emacs through a press of a button, show a tooltip or a hovering window, directly over the text where my cursor is? Not another window to the side of the editing window or below it. I want my eyes to be stationary and I want the tooltip to be easily dismissable.
Plus, IDEs have professional developers writing integrations so I don't have to, and they're paid to do that for tens of thousands of paying customers, so they pretty much are guaranteed to work. They are also pretty much guaranteed to work well with other advanced integrated features.
2. Why would I want to put a tooltip over an emacs window?
3. The things that contemporary IDEs can do that Emacs may be clunkier at are mostly things I'm not interested in doing. They are also often addressable in totally different ways. The speed of tools like ag(1) and their integration into Emacs changes the need for Emacs itself to be able to take me to special places in a codebase, for example.
Why would you want to? I don't know.
But <<I>>'d want to :-)
Let me check...
Yes, it can do it. In org mode at least.
I have spent way more time fighting against the VS Code configuration than I would like, and even comparing it against all the time I've spent customizing Emacs over my lifetime, I don't think VS Code can come out ahead. All this because I'm not building my project with some build system that has a simple, easy integration with the IDE. When VS Code instantly works, it's great. Otherwise, I'm editing JSON configuration files. That doesn't seem like some massive improvement over editing your .emacs file. It's often worse.
Often it comes down to working with larger projects written in multiple languages. If you are working on some bog-standard JavaScript project that runs in the browser, Node.js, or both, maybe you won't run into this stuff.
Emacs is my escape hatch for "damn, VS Code is messed up again, and I just want to work on the code instead of fussing about". I've had major problems getting VS Code to deal with the C or C++ code that I work on, like, at all. I'm hesitant to even try CLion because it sounds like many of the problems are the same there (it has great CMake integration... but I don't use CMake).
> One simple example, maybe Emacs can do this. Can Emacs through a press of a button, show a tooltip or a hovering window, directly over the text where my cursor is?
That's how code completion works in Emacs. Integrates with LSP, if you want, with various fallbacks.
LSP has really leveled the playing field between IDEs and Emacs. It lets you get a lot of the high-quality integrations, and they work well in both Emacs and IDEs. Prior to LSP, I'm going to say that the only easy way to get that kind of tooling was to use an IDE for a specific language, and it only worked well if your build system was integrated with that IDE.
> Plus, IDEs have professional developers writing integrations so I don't have to, and they're paid to do that for tens of thousands of paying customers, so they pretty much are guaranteed to work. They are also pretty much guaranteed to work well with other advanced integrated features.
My experience with C++ mode in VS Code is extremely rough.
This is the age-old problem... I remember reading people making the same complaints about IDEs and text editors on newsgroups in the 1990s. Like, if you are a Mac programmer, you want to use CodeWarrior... if it works. If you have a more complicated build system, then you need MPW. Too bad.
The experience with IDEs is getting better, much better, and I think all that is really happening is that Emacs users occasionally pop their heads over to IDE-land to see if will work for them. Sometimes it does, and you get one of those articles you're talking about.
That's because you're supposed to use Visual Studio for everything VS can do at all.
I'm fairly familiar with it, and how it's integrated with MSBuild, and what the limitations of MSBuild are, and whether I'm comfortable working within those limitations (and porting my code to Windows).
It's flexible to cover maybe 90-95% of development needs for the main language targeted.
And for those clearly defined use cases, modern IDEs generally fly. Which is far from guaranteed with bespoke configurations (Emacs, Vim).
Eclipse has Javascript and Python plugins, for example so you can code in Java, Javascript, Python at the same time.
VS Code has a ton of language plugins you can use all at the same time.
IntelliJ has a ton of language plugins you can also use all at the same time.
No, they don't. Show me the IDEs with Common Lisp, Coq, Ocaml, Haskell, Elm, ... support. That's actually the reason Code is a real alternative to Emacs and Intellij isn't.
Emacs shines when using Coq (with Proof General) or Common Lisp or Clojurescript (I guess Clojure too). But for mainstream languages like JS, Go or Python you're better off with something like Code.
The massive flaw in your analogy being that Emacs has more to do with an old and crumbling collection racing car than a F1. Its users constantly need to tinker it to make it somewhat run like a normal car. Itβs still slower and less ergonomic but they are blinded by their love and habit to its obvious flaws.
The amount of IDE and editors that just work well with little customisation and have great refactoring features is now so high, it leaves little place for emacs.