I’m relatively new to programming, I’ve been learning C on linux using nano and it’s been very fun. I’ve recently fallen into the emacs/vim rabbithole and I’ve been watching videos about emacs, Doom, spacemacs, neovim and reading comments about people switching from this or that to another config or editor, and I’ve been a bit lost on what to do. Then I realised that I haven’t done any coding and spent all of my time focusing on editors. So here is my question (which has probably been asked many times) : what is the point of investing so much time learning all of this when there are some IDEs that are preconfigured with all the functionality a programmer would need ? Does learning neovim or emacs actually save time in the long run? I know that they’re much more lightweight than IDEs and I’ve been really enjoying using the terminal much more than my time on IntelliJ, but having an easy out of the box visual debugger, refactoring and jump into functions can be really helpful in the long run I think, especially when starting to write actual large programs. Nano is fun, but not a time saver. Why did you chose your editor?
Emacs is my text editor, ide, git client, app launcher, element and IRC client, file manager, remote machine client (tramp + ssh/scp), docker client, sometimes even my window manager, and the list goes on. It starts at boot, and never shuts down alone.
Emacs/nvim don’t magically turn you into an efficient, ultra fast programmer. It just makes working with code nicer. Everything is just the way you want it because you spent time making it so it’s the way you want it. And that part is a great time sink.
A “normal” ide is going to have everything preconfigured, but good luck modifying anything. At best you’re going to get an API that forces you to jump through a bunch of hoops to add some functionality. No ide/editor offers the same degree of freedom that Emacs does.
Is it worth it? That’s a question only you can answer… For me, Emacs is irreplaceable.