Yet the amount of cruft is still not enough to make it irrelevant.<p>IDEs come and go. Emacs stays. It used to be mocked to be too large, today it&#x27;s an average package, and tiny compared to other IDEs. It does a lot and let you extend it very freely (as of 2008, doing anything in Eclipse was a burden, can&#x27;t speak of todays state though, I&#x27;ll add that Emacs cruft has nothing to be ashamed of to the Eclipse Plugin and Workspace model, hundreds of (Object) list.get(arbitrary-index), TIMTOWDI.. )<p>People drool over features that were present in emacs for decades (flex match), and I&#x27;ve seen emacs absorb new ones (in-place evaluation of code with value preview for instance) faster than I would hope (a few years ago, a 2h sublime demo had literally nothing special).<p>It&#x27;s syntax system felt (I never looked into it) superior to Eclipse (except for JDT) and VS.<p>Also Emacs users have a way of doing things. No mouse, often very lean. I&#x27;ll rant about Eclipse again, but it really is bad. My hands hurts after one day (I morphed into an emacs alien maybe). Git integration is between unusable and useless (after 10y+ of work). etc etc<p>Plus energy is still flowing, look at Spacemacs, it&#x27;s a lot less absurd than emacs, with a more stable plugin mechanism. People are still working on bringing guile elisp mode as the base vm.<p>Emacs have a lot of issues, and they don&#x27;t matter.