Emacs is extremely powerful and useful out of the box. Over the 16 years that I've been using it, I have repeatedly run into examples of real-world problems (refactors, broad code changes, text-based processing) that have been too hard or too time consuming for other developers to work on; or worse, that people feel they have to write a script to solve. As an emacs user, I don't have to write a script, I just run a few built-in commands using a couple keystrokes (or record a macro) and I'm done in a few minutes. This kind of advantage over all other non-emacs-aware computer professionals has served me well - it's literally a "secret-weapon" level of advantage that emacs users have.

I like that the software is free, powerful enough for a beginner to start learning the basics of working with CAD.

CppCMS is free to use, easy to understand and adopt for my C++ web projects.