Haha, why is that? To be clear that’s not an expectation of the job. It’s a self imposed process so that I understand wtf is going on. I enjoy it personally and feel it makes me better at what I do. Why do you think it’s bullshit?

First I wouldn’t concern myself too much with trying to explain what differentiates Emacs from an IDE. Life is too short to get into such debates. I can’t really summarize why anyone should care about Emacs vs their IDE of choice.

For me what separates Emacs from vscode for instance is not the IDE aspects but the integration with the broader ecosystem. I’m a PM that works with technical and data heavy products. The details matter. I frequently walk through the pipelines and code of my product to understand how it is implemented by the team(s).

For example you can break my underlying product down into 3-4 large blocks of pipelines. Each pieline has 6-7 stages that mix Spark and other Python jobs. For each pipeline and stage I have my own little literate org file that points to code, has small samples of inputs and outputs, and generally speaking allows a non data engineering professional such as myself keep up with people that are far better and keeping this all in their head.

I write down questions as I do this to browse and/or raise with the team. I can, when questioned by our senior leadership, truly explain what it is our team did and the impact it had.

I can’t do that with an IDE. I can’t see an easy way to do that with any of the other note taking tools. I can’t jump between code browsing, executing and writing as seamlessly anywhere else.

I started with Spacemacs. Switched to Doom. Switched to my own vanilla emacs for a year or two then went back to Doom.

I find Doom’s defaults well thought out. It just works (insofar as Emacs just works). It has sane default bindings and I can just use emacs to get my job done. There’s nothing inherently noble about rolling your own config or choosing a particular kit. Just try them out and see which you enjoy.