In 20 or 40 years, emacs will still exist, as will the hooks and tools you&#x27;ve integrated and built up to support it.<p>VS, Eclipse, and IntellijIDEA very likely won&#x27;t.<p>And I say that as someone who doesn&#x27;t use Emacs much -- I&#x27;d learned it at one point and used it pretty heavily for a job, with a very nice set of modes for a proprietary software tool I was using at the time, but made the critical career error of working for an idiot boss who didn&#x27;t believe any software other than what the vendor provided was necessary on corporate servers.<p>So yes, I use vim.<p>But I&#x27;ve learned ... at least a dozen editors and development environments which are either dead or proprietary and not availa ble to me.  Time which I <i>could</i> have devoted to learning persistent tools and extending them.<p>That&#x27;s among the strongest arguments in favour of using Free Software tools generally, from a technical PoV.  Your knowledge tends to remain relevant far, far longer.