Whenever I hear about or see the .vimrc and .emacs files people create, maintain and constantly modify to me this just looks like the perfect example of a sunk cost fallacy.
IDEs are usually dismissed by many such people since you can (allegedly) do the same in vim/emacs but to me this seemed crazy as I'd see people spend hours configuring plugins, writing Lisp and whatever to save them on some task they'd get for free with a right click in IntelliJ.
I really do think people completely underestimate how much time they have and will invest in such endeavours. I mean if this makes you happy or you like this tinkering, by all means be my guest, but I'll take a hard pass.
Would you rather drive a nice car that needs some loving care and maintenance once in a while or an old banger that just gets the job done? It's the same sort of prospect.
Some people like to work in a nice environment where they are able to remove all the little frustrations that less customizable tools often force upon you. When emacs annoys you at least you can fix it if it is annoying enough for you to want to do so.
In any case neither choice is wrong or right. Do whatever floats your boat.
It's not an example of sunk cost fallacy, much less a "perfect" one. If you
insist on shoehorning it, then the fallacy argues against you since the future
value of emacs is no longer diminished by the sunk cost of configuring it.
Because when you start to feel like the editor is an extension of yourself the feeling is so sublime. I’ve had collegues who literall pick up there mouse and click to go to the beginning of a line. It’s sad.
For some people, it's the other way around. Emacs makes it simple to automate things. And there's no such thing as "excessive automation." Proprietary IDEs are like Steve Yegge once said: "are cookie-cutter solutions." To me, it's not even about productivity; it's about minimizing frustration. Repetitive and mundane tasks (no matter how small they seem to be) can and should be automated.
Practical examples of how using Emacs makes my life easier:
- I conduct Web searches right from my IDE. I can search on Wikipedia, Google, Github, YouTube, WolframAlpha, etc. I can select any piece of text/code and perform a search. One day I even realized that I could also enforce the programming language on Github. It took me about ten minutes to extend the existing functionality of the Emacs package called `engine,` now whenever I'm writing, for example, Clojure code, and I need to search for a selected piece of code on Github it automatically appends `Language=Clojure` to the search parameters.
- We have a convention to have suffixes in our git branches that denote the ticket number associated. So I used to go to Jira, find my ticket, then think about the branch name, then type it, sometimes I would mistype the ticket number. One day I sat down, spend about twenty minutes, wrote a little piece of emacs-lisp. For a given Jira ticket number, it fetches its summary and then, based on that summary, generates a "git-friendly" branch name. It's not like it would take me too long doing it the old way. But now it literally takes less than a second, and it is way less frustrating.
- I use Org-mode, which by itself is a hands-down the best todo-list/organizer/note-taking/journaling app. We also use Slack at work. Very often, I would copy Slack conversation and paste it to my main org-mode file, so the relevant information (associated with a unit of work) is close-by. I used to do it manually. The other day I sat down and wrote a script that retrieves that info from Slack by using its API and automatically generates an Org-mode heading.
I can provide countless examples of seemingly small things like that, but those who are now settled with using their favorite IDE probably won't be impressed or moved.
Don't get me wrong - IntelliJ is a superb product. I myself used WebStorm, PyCharm, RubyMine, and Ultimate for a number of years. About seven years to be more precise. I learned their IDE to the pieces. I have discovered undocumented/poorly documented features. I used to hang big print-out posters with the major keybindings on my walls. I participated in developing plugins. But still moved to Emacs, because there is simply no software product in existence with the extensibility capabilities that can match.
Please, don't underestimate the ingenuity of tinkerers. Best artists, watch-makers, and carpenters are known to create their own tools or pick up designs of someone else's and improve upon them. In their hands, the instrument that they have might be a thousand times more powerful and capable, compared to one that was created by an army of specialists.
IDEs are usually dismissed by many such people since you can (allegedly) do the same in vim/emacs but to me this seemed crazy as I'd see people spend hours configuring plugins, writing Lisp and whatever to save them on some task they'd get for free with a right click in IntelliJ.
I really do think people completely underestimate how much time they have and will invest in such endeavours. I mean if this makes you happy or you like this tinkering, by all means be my guest, but I'll take a hard pass.