> If your editor is Emacs, congratulations: that's the MS Word of text editors -- kitchen sink included, but not everything ideally placed unless you do a lot of customization.) Then someone shows you an IDE.
That analogy doesn't stand at all. Most of the people whose editor of choice is Emacs(mine is Vim) have known about IDEs all along, have used them at some point of time, or may be still use it for languages which are too verbose to do without IDE code generation. They chose not to use it, or use it sparcely. There is no someone showing you an IDE.
The beauty of emacs/vim is that they are a. highly optimised to enable quick editing of any text document, not just a specific subset of languages, and b. highly customisable - the customisation isn't an annoying overhead, rather it lets you define exactly how you want the environment to be whereas an ide tends to be harder to customise to that degree.
Horses for courses.
As an aside - I think the analogy fails purely in terms of quality, word is a horrible mess and a nightmare to work with, emacs is a (sometimes clunky) thing of beauty.
That analogy doesn't stand at all. Most of the people whose editor of choice is Emacs(mine is Vim) have known about IDEs all along, have used them at some point of time, or may be still use it for languages which are too verbose to do without IDE code generation. They chose not to use it, or use it sparcely. There is no someone showing you an IDE.