I don't know what to tell you. I myself never got into Emacs on the first try. It took me about two years of constant debate and deliberation. At that time, I was using IntelliJ and had been for seven years. I knew it extremely well and was very happy with it. Yet, seeing what’s possible with Emacs continuously fueled my curiosity. I was annoyed by my own inability to finally understand what makes it so great. Little by little, I started finding features and packages that were awesome, but I still kept stumbling on other roadblocks that ruined the whole experience. At some point, instead of blindly copy-pasting Elisp snippets, I tried to dissect and understand them and had a few aha moments. Finally, one day, I decided that instead of reaching for the tools I knew well already, for every problem at hand, I would try to figure out how to get it done with Emacs. It was very slow at first, but after a couple of weeks, I felt more productive than I ever was with other tools. A few months later, I received a notification about having to extend my IntelliJ license, and I realized that I didn’t need it anymore.
Emacs is extremely empowering, although it comes at a cost, even though technically it is free. For some people, including myself, that time is the best lifetime investment. I have never regretted the time and effort I spent learning it. Even with the plethora of features that constantly get added to VSCode, I have zero FOMO. I do occasionally fire it up just to make sure I don't get stuck in my bubble. Once you understand how advising functions work in Emacs and realize that you can redefine any behavior of any function, whether third-party or built-in, it gives you incredible authority over absolutely any textual data you have to deal with on your computer. Check this out: I can perform a search that looks for things on Google, DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, my browser history, and other sources (this is customizable). Then, I can select any given url and send it to an LLM to extract a summary. After that, I can create a note with a deadline and schedule to review it at a specific date and time, or add this stuff to my Anki cards collection. All that without ever leaving Emacs, and with just a few keystrokes.
If you ever feel curious about it again, maybe try Doom Emacs. Who knows? Maybe this time, it will be different.
Emacs is extremely empowering, although it comes at a cost, even though technically it is free. For some people, including myself, that time is the best lifetime investment. I have never regretted the time and effort I spent learning it. Even with the plethora of features that constantly get added to VSCode, I have zero FOMO. I do occasionally fire it up just to make sure I don't get stuck in my bubble. Once you understand how advising functions work in Emacs and realize that you can redefine any behavior of any function, whether third-party or built-in, it gives you incredible authority over absolutely any textual data you have to deal with on your computer. Check this out: I can perform a search that looks for things on Google, DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, my browser history, and other sources (this is customizable). Then, I can select any given url and send it to an LLM to extract a summary. After that, I can create a note with a deadline and schedule to review it at a specific date and time, or add this stuff to my Anki cards collection. All that without ever leaving Emacs, and with just a few keystrokes.
If you ever feel curious about it again, maybe try Doom Emacs. Who knows? Maybe this time, it will be different.