Some here are old enough to remember "emacs: eight megabytes and constantly swapping", back when a stick of RAM could have been 8 Megabytes...

> text editors that don't lock up when I type an open paren

This miiiiight be just you. Even sublime text (forget vim or another cli editor) runs fine on ancient hardware.

What type of files are you editing?

> Or use entire sticks of RAM at rest.

I'd hope my text editors would use as much ram as it needs in order to give me the smoothest experience. If possible, that means storing the whole file in RAM (up to a set limit).

Stop using editors written in Javascript by overpaid new-grads