I just want to share my anecdotal, personal story. I used IntelliJ professionally for almost a decade. I learned some advanced and undocumented features. I've collaborated with Jetbrains team members to help improving the features. It felt like I work for them. I still occasionally receive YouTrack notification emails for the bugs I posted circa 2009, that are still not fixed today, btw.
IntelliJ is to blame for why my transition to Emacs took me two years - I carried the fear of investing too much into a new thing. I feared of liking it, and someday not finding some features I was so attached to in IntelliJ. I was scared that I will be intellectually and emotionally "locked in", while I was already vendor locked-in and condemned to be using IntelliJ forever.
I was so wrong - not only have I found everything I needed, and more, I have developed a true hacker's mindset. Honestly, the only regret I still carry today, even after years of Emacs use, is that I did not attempt to learn it sooner. I no longer experience FOMO - I can easily pick up IntelliJ whenever I want again, I just haven't found a real, pragmatic reason to do so. In fact, I do fire it up on occasion, just to get the feel of how things evolving there, to steal some good ideas, etc.
> and IdeaVIM
Gary Bernhardt famously said - "There's no such thing as vim-mode". And to the degree, he was right - pretty much every editor/IDE that tries to integrate Vim features invariable ends up having glaring deficiencies. IdeaVIM is good enough, but only to the point - for an expert vimmer it may feel annoying. VSCode vim experience is similar, and Sublime as well - there's really no good comparison between them to say which one is really "better", they all have a spectrum of weird, quirky behaviors. There's one notable exception - Evil-mode in Emacs is fantastically good - sometimes you even forget that it's not a built-in feature, but a third-party extension, an afterthought.
> shortcuts can be assigned for almost every command
In Emacs, you can bind keys to anything, conversely - everything is a command - every keypress, every mouse click and mouse-scroll. And since Emacs is inherently a modal editor, you can do stuff like binding commands to a double, triple, etc. keypresses. Like for example, when I'm typing fast, to autofix most recent typo I'd just tap comma twice - this is just one example of unbelievably fast way to stay focused.
Most devs, once they find their favorite tool would settle with it and don't even explore other options. "I don't have time for that.", "I don't want to be building my editor", "I am already so good with what I have, why?", they would say. My suggestion is to always stay skeptical of current choices and curious about unknown. It's not the concrete implementations, but rather abstract ideas that may grant some surprising and unexpected benefits.
