I feel like there is this vibe out there that if you don't use emacs then you're some kind of inferior developer who has to rely on tools to do his/her work. That perpetuates a myth that everybody of significance is using it. I don't buy it either.
Just antidotally I've only run into one or two developers who use emacs or vim as their primary code editor. A lot of people like myself, though are proficient with one or another shell editor (Vim in my case) that they use when working directly on a server, or for certain, occasional things where it's more convenient.
I think we, as developers, go out of our way to perpetuate that myth. How many times have you heard an experienced developer sneer at a newbie because they're using Notepad or gEdit? I think that there is definitely a tendency amongst developers to venerate tools and forget that tools are great only insofar as they allow you to be more productive. When I'm using software, I care that it's correct, that its user interface is understandable, that it's secure, extensible and performant. Approximately none of those things have a correlation with the editor or IDE used to write the tool.
Why not? I'm only slightly trolling. This is exactly the attitude I'm talking about. We tell newbies that it's not possible to be productive in Notepad or gEdit, and then hand them a text editor that doesn't even write letters onto the screen when you type.
The key word here is actually editor. Of course notepad and similar work perfectly fine if all you are doing is monotonically outputting a stream of text. When you want to navigate it and make changes, however, they break down (in comparison with alternatives). For most of us, we spend more time editing than writing - even in greenfield development.
For whatever it's worth, that is what I tell newbies when I demand they switch to "some kind of real editor". As it happens, I'm fairly nondenominational when it comes to which they use; though I certainly have my personal preferences my advice is usually to switch to the editor for which mentoring is most easily available to them.
Just antidotally I've only run into one or two developers who use emacs or vim as their primary code editor. A lot of people like myself, though are proficient with one or another shell editor (Vim in my case) that they use when working directly on a server, or for certain, occasional things where it's more convenient.