What I find truly bizarre is how many software engineers, who are aware of how much they earn and how long it really takes to make software, are so resistant to paying anything for tools that make their job easier and faster. It blows my mind. Take the Jetbrains IDEs. I don't mean to offend any VSC fans out there but the Jetbrains IDEs are simply better and more mature in every single way. For individual use, most of…
* Freedom - my workflow is centered around modifying tools to suit my use case. OSI open source makes this easier sometimes.
* Ubiquity - I detest spending time updating license keys, figuring out if that key works with the version I downloaded, finding out that new-feature isn't available in the version I paid for, or wrangling with how many computers my license will allow me to run the tool on. If the trappings and enforcement of monetization weren't present, I'd spend a lot more money on software tools.
Aside: I worked on a team managing build infra at one point, and just getting license servers and license files set up so that CI could leverage proprietary tools was a major, sustained effort. I know personal tooling is more lightweight, but the same dynamics are present.
So my investment in tuning Emacs feels to me like an actual investment: I've gotten really good at tuning Emacs for various uses, and the time I spent on that has made me a more effective engineer in some ways. I bring Emacs to every job I work and even if I end up using JetBrains for e.g. Android dev, I still have Emacs in my pocket for text editing, Magit, org mode, dired, and shells/terms. I don't feel the same way about time spent managing licenses for proprietary tooling, or even learning this particular company's git tooling; I just keep using Magit. Maybe others don't feel as strongly that their preferred tooling be "everywhere", but I really value it.