Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)

Yes. I've been Emacs guy for close to two decades now, and switched to Evil about four years ago, because Vim controls are just better, no two ways about it. However you still need to escape back into Emacs every now and then to do various un-Evil'd tidbits. That's easy for me, but would be problematic for someone who expects Evil to (as you put it) "fix Emacs".

So true! When I first tried to get into Emacs it was as a somewhat seasoned programmer who wanted to play with a Lisp other than Scheme. I've read the built-in tutorial and almost ran away in horror. I get it - for non-programmer users, yes, it makes sense to try to teach them the usage of an editor. I lost quite a lot of time trying to remember exotic chords like C-u C-x ^ a and so on, but it was ultimately meaningless - not one such shortcut remains in my config.

Emacs is an IDE for Emacs Lisp written in Emacs Lisp (and it's incredibly powerful at that, BTW). In other words, it's a bunch of APIs you can call, and it also gives you the place where you can interactively execute any elisp code and see the effects immediately in the same instance of the editor. It's obvious in hindsight, but I believe I'd get into Emacs much faster if I started with Emacs Lisp manual or maybe "Writing GNU Emacs Extensions" book instead of going through the Emacs manual (huuuuuge!) first and trying to bend my habits to fit the vanilla Emacs.

I think most programmers who wish to switch to Emacs should try to do it the other way: start with learning Elisp syntax and Paredit, then learn about modes, hooks, and key-maps and start hacking your own config. Everything else - buffers, windows, fringes, faces, what-have-you - you'll learn as needed when you need to implement a particular command which deals with them. Pull in a healthy amount of plugins then read their source - or just read the source of Emacs, as you can jump to definition of any function in one click, even if it's written in C - and before long you'll have a comfortable environment to work in, with all the features you learned to love from your previous editor. And that's when the fun part start: exploring Emacs features that you've never seen or heard about, wrapping external tools and streamlining their workflows, exploring the huge pile of add-ons.

It may not be built-in, but saying Emacs "has no support" for tabs when there are at least three (if not more) plugins which provide them is a stretch. Personally, I use elscreen, but forked and changed so that tabs are displayed in a reserved window instead of on the header line.

There are some lacking features in terms of GUI display, especially compared to newer editors, but other than that Emacs supports the widest array of features and sometimes even a couple competing implementations for them.

Say I code in Python, with docs and shell windows on the right. Then I want to quickly take a look at git history. But, if I start magit, it will hijack the window configuration and my carefully placed/resized windows will get messy. So, I open a new tab and start magit there. Now, I can switch between the two tabs - ie. window/buffer layouts - with a single key.

The fact that I mention saving the layout of windows should hint that I know you can do this in vanilla Emacs by saving and restoring window configurations, but it's much less hassle with tabs. Also, you can hide tab bar (as well as menu bar and button bar) when you don't need it, and it's actually quite handy when you do need it.

To each their own of course, just saying there are good uses for tabs in Emacs, unless you want to delegate this to your WM and launch one frame per window config.