Emacs, and XEmacs (the one I favoured), were my way to make for lack of mature IDEs in UNIX, me missing out on Borland and Microsoft stuff, between 1994 and 2005 when coding on UNIX.

Eventually since moving into managed languages, alongside the uptake of Eclipse, Netbeans, KDevelop, QtCreator, JetBrains products,... I stop using it as my default UNIX editor.

However still install it, just in case, too much muscle memory regarding meta commands and elisp.