There&#x27;s a subtle benefit that I haven&#x27;t seen any of the other comments describe: the UI is made up of text, and I don&#x27;t mean that in some curmudgeonly &quot;things were better back in the day&quot; way. I mean that all of the commands you use for navigating and manipulating text, moving between frames and windows and so on all use one consistent interface. With magit, I can be editing a file, hit Ctrl-C, g, then do some git manipulations and switch back to my work with a much smaller mental context switch.<p>And because all of the modes share that emacs feel (except for the vi-emulation, I guess), that knowledge is transferable across every language you work on, instead of learning a new (possibly proprietary) IDE for each new language.