What's better than Vim? Vim and Emacs: http://spacemacs.org/ (use the dev branch)
My biggest problem is that it is SLOW.
Emacs, even without the Spacemacs bloat, would regularly freeze up on me or feel slow and a bit sluggish.
My main reason for sticking with (neo)vim over Jetrains IDEs or VS Code is the incredible responsiveness. Thanks to Coc et al we now get awesome IDE features too, and Vim is easy enough to customize. (though not as much as Emacs, obviously) .
VSCode is great and responsive locally on this macbook pro, and running locally on Windows 10 with a directory open in WSL is also very snappy. Unfortunately some of my work has to be conducted in an Amazon Workspace, which is so slow sometimes as to be unusable. So frustrating, and apropos of nothing, just wanted to rant!
But I think this is also a matter of perspective. Other developers don't understand why Jetbrains IDEs feel sluggish to me and think it might be my machine etc. (I have a very beefy one)
It's just that with (neo)vim, a fast terminal and no blocking plugins everything feels instant and extremely responsive.
My notes on using Doom: https://noelwelsh.com/posts/2019-01-10-doom-emacs.html
And which operations are slow? Emacs's term mode, shell mode, etc, are 100s of times slower than most terminal apps at scrolling thousands of lines at the user, which is a common part of the workflow of some C programmers. Is that where it is slow for you?
I was wondering were that method were to be paired with a tutorial, if that would help ease people into Spacemacs/Emacs more. In other words, each step or lesson in the tutorial enables a new feature and explores it. So perhaps start with basic text editing, saving, opening, recently used files etc. Then add something like git or magit, and explore how that is used, then explore how the git and editing interact. Each new feature discussed would be like adding a new layer to the ~/.spacemacs file.