I somehow find myself commenting on these threads the most on this site purely to bring up vterm. I think the combination of a well-polished Emacs (like DOOM), evil-mode for vi modal editing everywhere and critically vterm/emacs-libvterm make for a great workflow[1].
Sure there's all the regular Emacs value-adds (Org-mode, Magit, TRAMP etc.) and there's no rush to start learning them, but navigating local/remote codebases all the while treating Dired filesystem views, regular files AND terminal ptys as buffers with full modal editing I find to be something of a special power. This has been possible for a long time with eshell/shell etc. but vterm really takes the lag out of it IMO. This workflow was certainly my gateway drug to Emacs. It displaced nearly two decades of vim for editing and tmux for terminals. YMMV.
Sure there's all the regular Emacs value-adds (Org-mode, Magit, TRAMP etc.) and there's no rush to start learning them, but navigating local/remote codebases all the while treating Dired filesystem views, regular files AND terminal ptys as buffers with full modal editing I find to be something of a special power. This has been possible for a long time with eshell/shell etc. but vterm really takes the lag out of it IMO. This workflow was certainly my gateway drug to Emacs. It displaced nearly two decades of vim for editing and tmux for terminals. YMMV.
[1] I wrote a bit about the workflow and continuing to train better with vim bindings using Emacs https://martin.baillie.id/wrote/evil-motion-training-for-ema...