As a heavy Emacs user for over a decade: I still use IDEs instead of Emacs for programming. Emacs has plenty of uses outside of SW development. Only recently did I manage to set up my Emacs to have IDE-like capabilities for my Python work. But if I switched to a C++ job, I'll use an IDE. And maybe, over the course of a year or two, I'll bother setting up LSP for Emacs.

It's totally fine to use IDEs if they make your life easier. In my last C++ job, I would edit code with Emacs, but keep Visual Studio open for the IDE conveniences.

I use it at my current job in which I work in a large C++ codebase. I formerly used CLion.

Whether Emacs is an IDE or not depends how you define IDE. I use Eglot [0] for LSP integration; this gives me IDE-like features like "jump-to-definition", syntax error highlights, warnings, etc. and integrates with company-mode [1] for code completion. This handles most of my needs for writing code.

As for other things like a file tree, I've found that the built in `project-find-file` command combined with `vertico` [2] and `orderless` [3] makes finding files and navigating around projects easier; that pair behaves similarly to CMD+P in Sublime Text or VS Code. There are file tree packages out there, but I've found that I don't really need a file tree in practice and that I prefer navigating around projects with fuzzy file search and grep.

[0] https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot [1] https://github.com/company-mode/company-mode [2] https://github.com/minad/vertico [3] https://github.com/oantolin/orderless

I use emacs as an IDE with a large C++ (and python) codebase. I use emacs-lsp + clangd for completion/jump to definition/syntax error highlighting etc, but for whole tree searches, I find clangd unreliable, so sometimes I fall back to emacs-ag (I assume that emacs-ripgrep would be even better) for brute force searches.

I never found a side panel of any use (many are available), but I use projectile for quick jump to file all the time.

My python setup is less refined than C++ (I haven't bothered yet to enable LSP), but I use elpy which is works fine for lisp-style programming with a persistent REPL.

This interesting to me. The sidebar in IDEs is one of the features I dislike most about them. I vastly prefer the C-x C-f helm menu with it's fuzzy search to IDE approach of aimlessly clicking around a directory tree like a philistine. For the rest (linting, syntax, autocomplete), lsp and a language mode make me pretty happy.

Give tide a try. I use it daily with typescript and it's great :-)

Have you tried Doom Emacs?