&gt;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>&gt; VS, Eclipse, and IntellijIDEA very likely won&#x27;t.<p>Why do you think so ?<p>Intellij and Eclipse are both open source. I suspect they will be around as well. The companies supporting them may go out of business, but there are enough users for it at the moment that someone will be able to keep maintaining it or build new businesses around it.