The beauty of Emacs is that *everything* is a buffer: text, directories, SQL consoles, shells, you name it. And because of that all of the standard things work everywhere: navigation, cut and paste, keyboard macros, etc.

It's fun to show a complex multi-buffer keyboard macro (enter each file in this directory, perform some editing magic that's beyond sed or awk, save the file, run a command on the file in a shell, repeat) to someone who's used to something like Visual Studio Code or Sublime. No comparison for certain things.

For modern development though VSC is superior for most things: yes, Emacs has most of the whizzo features like context completion, syntax, hiliting, etc. but it's always a just enough harder to setup and just enough jankier to use that sometimes I wish I didn't have 33 years of Emacs muscle memory making it difficult to learn another editor.

Back when I used vi (first year of school) I worked for my dad's radio station over the summer building a song rotation scheduler in Paradox. Database of songs, build a list with certain rules, etc.

Paradox had a built-in editor for PAL scripts but it was pretty much garbage... except for one thing: they implemented an on-load hook that would run a PAL script.

I implemented a significant subset of vi using that on-load: search, buffers, all kinds of stuff. It was a little slow because I basically had to open up a permanent keystroke input routine and manage whether it was in insert mode or not, but man was it a lot better than just the built-in.