I tried Emacs a bit after using Sublime Text for a while. I'm still using Sublime Text to this day because muscle memory, but the experience got me a deeper understanding of the capabilities of Sublime. While Emacs is profoundly hackable it feels a little bit "rough" on the edges. Sublime feels less hackable but more "clean".

I did not get IDEmacs ( https://codeberg.org/IDEmacs/IDEmacs ) to work but it basically it's an editor I would use.

For now fresh ( https://github.com/sinelaw/fresh/tree/master ) seems to be very promising.

Anyway I traded very happily the command palette Ctrl-Shift-P in Sublime for M-x and few other cool things.

Emacs will always have all my respect because of the concepts it introduced.

There's a fun thing regarding Emacs, lots of stuff came first in Emacs and trickled down to other editors or IDEs sometimes in a better form but often times in an inferior or lowest common denominator form. For example while command palettes are a thing in lots of places nowadays Emacs' M-x can be customized in lots of ways i.e. Orderless and prescient.el matching, sorting alphabetically, by recently used or most frequently used and so on.

Stuff like terminal panes in code editors again have been a thing for a long time in Emacs though now they're better out of the box in VS Code or Zed.

There's lots of LLM and recently agentic stuff in Emacs but it's not as good unless you spend time to configure it for your own workflow. Think mass-market versus artisanal.

I don't mention these to simply draw parallels but to contextualize the fact that lots of people using Emacs will go "Yeah, we have had that for a long time!" while also having a blindspot regarding how well the "new stuff" is integrated together for mass-appeal in something like a Jetbrains IDE. See magit which is amazing for advanced stuff that's complicated to do through the git CLI yet the most common git operations are usually better presented in something like Zed for example.

Though this sounds like a rant, it's not really meant as one. I'm a happy Emacs user but sometimes I like to branch out and see the UX improvements I'm sometimes missing out on. On that note I'd love Obsidian but with org-mode instead of markdown (though these days I'd settle for djot too).