Emacs is a very general and fundamental tool.  It&#x27;s &quot;do one thing well&quot; is &quot;organise textual interactions, via lisp&quot;.  And that ranges from editing to shell to numerous programming environments to email to web....<p>I&#x27;m actually thinking of picking up Emacs again as a preferred option to a browser.<p>Eclipse and Intellij may be open source (and I&#x27;m sufficiently unfamiliar with them that I&#x27;d blown that fact, thanks for the correction), but they&#x27;re far narrower in scope.  That itself tends to be a strike against.  Even broadly-used tools -- say, Perl -- can be, pardon the term, eclipsed by others.<p>Mind to:  learning multiple ways isn&#x27;t a Bad Thing.  But being <i>highly</i> mindful of what tends to survive and what doesn&#x27;t is itself useful.<p>Emacs dates from glass TTYs, and has survived to mobile devices.  I&#x27;ve seen enough of other tools to note the quirks of their own tech origins and how this has or hasn&#x27;t limited them over the years.<p>So:  consider mine a somewhat informed, somewhat uninformed opinion.  Though I&#x27;d still strongly recommend Emacs as a durable, extensible, and exceedingly useful skill.