The Emacs Lock-In Effect or the Emacs Sunk Cost Fallacy

I agree with what you say about IDEs, but Emacs' "advantage" over other text editors is that it is only superficially a text editor. It's really more of an operating system.

Pretty common, I think. I've made clamps and rove punches for instance, and I've been tempted to make drill bits. (But this is for wooden boatbuilding, which is its own uniquely crotchety corner of carpentry. Not unlike emacs...)

Even the current version of Emacs doesn't do fuzzy completion for M-x commands, just start-of-token completion; out of the box the completion is a little basic. I know there are packages which make this a lot better, but you have to know about the packages. :)

Even so, the "sort lines" example works well with even the out-of-the-box completion. But, Emacs sometimes has its own language for things. If I didn't know the keyboard commands for "make region uppercase" and "make region lowercase" (which in fact I'd forgotten, although they're pretty trivial), then as far as I could tell the best way I could find them would be: Google. Inside Emacs, I could type "M-x up" and get the correct "upcase-region", but if I'd typed "M-x upp", I'd be out of luck. And Emacs-ese for "lowercase" is "downcase"; I wouldn't have guessed that at all!

So I'm not sure the flow looks nigh identical for that many cases like this. The way I remember learning Emacs basics many years ago was actually through menus. Looking at Emacs's menus now, in v27.2, they're...kind of eclectic? The basics are there, but a lot, well, isn't. BBEdit is admittedly somewhat at the other extreme, with possibly just too damn much in its menus, but that does make a lot of its functionality very easily discoverable.

At any rate, I should be clear that I think this is a mild knock against Emacs; I bounce off it in part because of this relative lack of discoverability, and also because it just seems like it takes a lot of effort relative to most other editors to set up comfortably. The flip side of that is that, as the "Lock-In Effect" article notes, once you do have it set up the way you like it, you are probably never going to have any motivation to switch. That is absolutely not a knock -- it's configurable and extensible in a way nothing else is.

I've used Emacs for 32-33 years and I can't even imagine how many lines of code I've written in it.

Every 2-3 years since the early 2000s I would try an IDE for 1-2 months, but then go back to Emacs again because I was simply faster in Emacs and because the IDEs were supremely ugly, resource intensive and slow.

A few years ago things started to change. IDEs started to become less clumsy. Less horrible to de-fang to the point where they became tolerable. They might have gotten a bit faster too.

Then some time around february this year I felt it was time to give IDEs a try again so I spent about a week configuring VS Code to where it was tolerable. Mostly by removing visual noise. All keyboard bindings etc are standard because I think you ought to learn how to use a tool as close to its default configuration as possible because that means you can make use of the knowledge of other people.

Now, about 6 months later I think I might stick to VS Code for programming in the foreseeable future. Here are some reasons why:

- The support for various languages in Emacs just isn't being maintained. Every so many months my setup for Go would break hard, and along the way small things would constantly stop working and I would have to figure out "what the heck happened now" and hack my way around it. Or shrug and say "okay, so that's gone". This was no different in C/C++, Java and other languages in the past.

- Emacs doesn't have a sufficiently large active developer base. Not only does this lead to poorly maintained language support, but it kind of goes against one of my basic rules for choosing tools: no marginal stuff(1). And Emacs has become marginal. So while I love Emacs, it no longer qualifies as a viable tool in my eyes.

- Emacs isn't going to catch up with VS Code. And I don't think many long time Emacs users want to. They just want to be left alone. Emacs has too many failed attempts at making configuration and adding third party code work well (it really doesn't) and even work with the reams of elisp code each of us tend to end up with after years of trying to get broken stuff to work. Enough for us to develop Stockholm syndrome and thing we want all this chewing gum and duct tape holding things together.

- I don't like JS and its derivatives (like TS) and my dislike is almost militant -- but it beats elisp hands down on every metric that actually matters in the real world: chief among them the number of decent developers who will write and maintain extensions.

As I said, I still love Emacs and I've written close to 100% of my code in it for 30+ years. But I've kind of arrived at the conclusion that it isn't going to evolve fast enough for it to be an attractive option.

VS Code is far from ideal. For one it is written in a language I detest. But it is better for programming Go, and C++, and C and probably java (I haven't written a line of Java for 4 years so I don't know). Yes, it has shortcomings, but fewer than Emacs if your focus is to be a productive programmer and not muck about fixing poorly maintained bits that suddenly stop working.

If people think 30+ years of using Emacs represents an investment they can't afford to throw out I seriously doubt they have really tried. I also think people underestimate their own ability to rewire their brains. I turned 50 this year. I'm extremely conservative when it comes to tools, languages, operating systems because I'm just not that interested in wasting time tinkering with my environment: if it works it doesn't need messing with.

If I can get comfortable with a different environment for programming in a matter of weeks, so can anyone else.

(1) I try to avoid using tools and software that has too few users. Sure, there may be better tools, but tools with small audiences tend to not be well maintained over time. Few users also means fewer solutions you can find online to problems you might have. Pick tools that have large audiences and you will find people that have had the exact problem you are trying to solve. I apply this when choosing OS, language, hardware, tooling etc.

In college we were required to typeset assignments in LaTeX for all the math classes past multivariable calculus. I started out with Overleaf, but switched to local compilation about a year in. It's much nicer to be able to write in my usual text editor and compile documents instantly. On Arch, all I had to do was install texlive-most. It includes every package I have ever needed to use. To compile a document, I just run 'pdflatex *.tex'. Sometimes bibtex too. If you're having trouble with setup and configuration, I recommend texlive.