I'm sort of halfway in your description there. When I began my Unix journey 33 years ago, yeah, that's all that was available. I picked up emacs because I hated (and still hate) the modal aspect of vi, and because I also used emacs to connect to MUDs and MOOs and IRC, and read my email, all in one. On my 486 with 8MB of RAM, emacs did almost everything for me in one place. I grew to really like C/C++ mode in it, especially the way it handled indentation and reformatting at a time when this was actually not a commonly well-done thing even in some of the IDEs at the time.
I then left it backgrounded in my brain for a couple decades, only using it here and there when I didn't have a GUI available, while I used JetBrains IDEs. I couldn't be bothered to do all the customization.
But the past few weeks, I got pissed at JetBrains for the way they're handling the CLion->RustRover transition, and my CLion license ran out and I said f'it, and spent a weekend really tuning emacs for my workflow. And, honestly, it's kind of awesome.
The key point being I can make it do whatever I want really. So the learning curve really comes down to what I put on it. LSP + Company Mode + Rustic Mode + Treemacs + Projectile is a pretty good approximation of an IDE. And then I just went through and tuned it up with the bindings I wanted, adjusting things as I went.
I had never in 30 years invested this much time into emacs before, and it was entirely worth it.
Anyways, the TLDR is: it's not just the "I want to be hardcore" and "I am ancient", there's real practical value to the depth of these tools that's actually hard to get out of other "editors", even VS Code. I can't speak for Vim, I have never liked that way of editing, but with Emacs it's really about building your own lightsabre.
I then left it backgrounded in my brain for a couple decades, only using it here and there when I didn't have a GUI available, while I used JetBrains IDEs. I couldn't be bothered to do all the customization.
But the past few weeks, I got pissed at JetBrains for the way they're handling the CLion->RustRover transition, and my CLion license ran out and I said f'it, and spent a weekend really tuning emacs for my workflow. And, honestly, it's kind of awesome.
The key point being I can make it do whatever I want really. So the learning curve really comes down to what I put on it. LSP + Company Mode + Rustic Mode + Treemacs + Projectile is a pretty good approximation of an IDE. And then I just went through and tuned it up with the bindings I wanted, adjusting things as I went.
I had never in 30 years invested this much time into emacs before, and it was entirely worth it.
Anyways, the TLDR is: it's not just the "I want to be hardcore" and "I am ancient", there's real practical value to the depth of these tools that's actually hard to get out of other "editors", even VS Code. I can't speak for Vim, I have never liked that way of editing, but with Emacs it's really about building your own lightsabre.