Often, I enjoy running emacs (and vim) in a terminal. (And, by the way, as we all know, “VSCode” stands for “Eight Gigabytes And Constantly Swapping.”)

I use VSCode and Jupyter for writing code, but I always have emacs open for doing edits that would be time-consuming and onerous in VSCode, Jupyter, or my rich database client. I feel caught between the failure of text editors to become rich tools, and the failure of rich tools to become good text editors.

More like 5 minutes. Install the extensions for your programming languages and frameworks of choice (who conveniently embed LSP), learn Cmd+Maj+P to get the global command palette, and start working.

"real work" "better tools"

Data point: I do real work in emacs (people pay me money for it). I haven't written any major emacs modes (use-package desired-feature) is it for me. I've looked at vs code (to get personal experience e.g., gitlens is nice though I mostly use magit plus several "feature" packages). Emacs is much better tool for me: I have an order of magnitude more notes than corresponding code (org-mode is life changing), say, 300 lines of notes per 30 lines of code.

I have many of my colleagues use vs code--expectedly, I don't see the "betterness." Ultimately, I don't care what tools do you use as long as the results are acceptable.

Though, I don't understand why someone would use less powerful tools long-term. Given your 20+ years experience, it is interesting to see some specific examples.

If you spent 20+ years with Emacs, you should probably know to not compare it with VS Code. Emacs is more comparable to Bash than IDEs.

That's funny. I actually come from VSCode. I grew so sick of it that I decided to try Emacs. I hadn't done it because I always saw it as a meme because I always heard jokes about it.

I was horrified for months. How did no one tell me how much better Emacs is over pretty much everything and especially VSCode?

In terms of brilliance, VSCode is a photon or two. Emacs is the Tarantula Nebula.