Regarding Emacs vs. VS Code, it is kind of funny that Emacs was once the canonical big, fat, bloated editor, but it did not grow much bigger since then. So today, Emacs is kind of lightweight: On my work computer, VS Code will easily gobble up half a gigabyte of RAM with only a handful of files open, while Emacs with dozens of buffers consistently stays below 100 MB.

Compared to nvi or mg, GNU Emacs is still pretty big, but I think the size-to-feature-richness ratio is more balanced in Emacs. Also, I will come out and admit that I like Emacs for being Emacs. I have tried VS Code at work, and it is not bad. But from a certain point of view, VS Code is just Emacs Re-Imagined using Javascript instead of Lisp. And Emacs just has a ~30-year head start on VS Code at being Emacs. Last, but not least, the Emacs default key bindings for moving the cursor around are by now so deeply ingrained in my muscle memory that I will not willingly switch to an editor that does not support them. And all the Emacs-keybindings extensions for VS Code I have tried were ... not quite there, yet, at least for me.