- Superior search. Emacs has a better search. It offers way too many different ways for searching things - locally, remotely, recursively, partially, contextually, dynamically, etc. With filtering the results and sifting through and editing at the same time.
- Fine-grained window control. Emacs has some amazing window manipulation capacities. You can precisely control how, where, and what gets to show up on the screen, without having to constantly move things around, drag and resize with the mouse.
- Unmatched extensibility. Can you use Google-Translate to find a word (that you forgot) sitting on the tip of your tongue, then lookup its synonyms in Merriam-Webster, pick one, then check its definition and learn its etymology from Wiktionary? All without having to type a single search query in the browser, using just a few handy keyboard shortcuts, no mouse, no context switching? I just did, and didn't even have to switch the keyboard layout for another lang, I let Emacs handle that.
There's maybe one single thing that specialized IDEs sometimes do better than Emacs, that people often rave about and what earns the label "it just works". That would be intellisense and completions. But, these days, using lsp, and having sufficient knowledge of Emacs-lisp you can build your own, superior completion framework. Company, Corfu and Capf are incredibly good.
Disclaimer, I used Jetbrains products for many years and still sometimes fire up Android Studio (mainly to check how something works).
Sure, but how difficult would be to get them to work together? I dunno the specifics of those plugins, but let's say: one of them translates the best to and from French, and two others are great for Spanish. How difficult would be to run them all at once and collect the results to display in a single window?
In Emacs, I can feed the word at point to a bunch of local and online services and show the results in a single buffer, or insert them at cursor, or export to html, pdf, etc., or automatically send somewhere, or print. It would take me a few minutes and probably no longer than a dozen of lines of elisp. I wouldn't even have to save that code. Or restart Emacs. Or install any additional plugins that would require me to restart it. I wouldn't have to write code from scratch if I could reuse existing plugins. I can even suppress their desire to display things their way by tapping into their internal functions and force them to run my code instead. Which of that is possible in IntelliJ?
Having a similar feature "like in Emacs" doesn't make it exactly as powerful as in Emacs. In order to understand what makes Emacs so extensible, first, one has to grasp what makes Lisp so flexible. But that's a conversation for a whole 'nother topic.
- Superior search. Emacs has a better search. It offers way too many different ways for searching things - locally, remotely, recursively, partially, contextually, dynamically, etc. With filtering the results and sifting through and editing at the same time.
- Fine-grained window control. Emacs has some amazing window manipulation capacities. You can precisely control how, where, and what gets to show up on the screen, without having to constantly move things around, drag and resize with the mouse.
- Unmatched extensibility. Can you use Google-Translate to find a word (that you forgot) sitting on the tip of your tongue, then lookup its synonyms in Merriam-Webster, pick one, then check its definition and learn its etymology from Wiktionary? All without having to type a single search query in the browser, using just a few handy keyboard shortcuts, no mouse, no context switching? I just did, and didn't even have to switch the keyboard layout for another lang, I let Emacs handle that.
There's maybe one single thing that specialized IDEs sometimes do better than Emacs, that people often rave about and what earns the label "it just works". That would be intellisense and completions. But, these days, using lsp, and having sufficient knowledge of Emacs-lisp you can build your own, superior completion framework. Company, Corfu and Capf are incredibly good.
Disclaimer, I used Jetbrains products for many years and still sometimes fire up Android Studio (mainly to check how something works).