Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)

While I still use emacs, I find that that despite the "batteries included" narrative about emacs, the things which are not included are causes of major frustration.

Such essential functionality like grep-find and LSP servers which is required for out of the box auto complete are not bundled with emacs. Most modern IDEs/editors have these functionality baked in.

If you install emacs for windows you find that grep-find doesn't work, because it depends on support from environment. A full text search should be built into the editor.

Define modern.

IDEs with such capabilities were already available in the 1990's.

I became an XEmacs user in the 1990's, because there was hardly anything better in UNIX systems.

Remember, Emacs still lacked many niceties only available on XEmacs, and vim was yet to be invented.

This is how old such IDE features have been available.

XEmacs only came about because Lucid needed a front end to their IDE, Energize, which was extremely comprehensive and could even do "edit and continue" style development of C++ on Unix but, as jwz has it, the Unix community preferred its stone-knives-and-bearskins approach with command line tools.