> Makes sense. From the sounds of things, we went in very different directions because I cannot tolerate mouse use in my workflow
I half agree and half disagree. I also really hate having the mouse involved in my workflow.
> From the sounds of things you're used to discovery by context clicking and menu items, and emacs' lack of such things does hurt discovery.
That's part of it, but not all of it. I don't use context menus much and am also a keyboard-centric user. I rarely use menus for any common tasks.
That said, things that I do once a week, but do need to do, are often easier to do using a mouse (or rather, it's good that a better discovery mechanism exists for them).
> Lastly I'm not sure the distinction "modern IDE" is helpful. Neo/vim and emacs are both under very active development.
That's true, but that's not what most people mean. I think the 'modern' comes in in terms of UX, or at least that's at the root of things - because almost everything can be done with vim/emacs, except for fundamentally changing how they look (different fonts/colors/etc). Or changing the under-the-hood stuff (like running parallel processes).
> For example I'll take my beautiful full screen spacemacs with the bells and whistles turned on over the looks of my colleagues' VSCode any day.
I mean, obviously this is subjective. But GUIs that allow a full range of colors/sizes/etc, and are not limited to only being text buffers, do objectively allow you to do more things. And it's no coincidence that almost all IDEs/editors don't use a single font size everywhere, etc.
> "Willingness to put the time in" of course exists in a continuum. I know fantastic programmers who gave up on the effort of emacs, and others who tell me that I'm selling myself short by stooping to spacemacs instead of rolling my own. So everyone's MMV.
I mean, I used vim for about 8 years, including writing (personal use) plugins and having a very large .vimrc. I then switched to spacemacs, had a bunch of configurations there as well.
So I feel like I've definitely put in a decent amount of time getting "good" at vim (and to a much smaller extent, spacemacs).
Still, putting aside the pure text-manipulation aspects of vim productivity, just launching VSCode and opening a folder gets you way more of the way to productive coding than everything I managed to roll out using a vimrc (and does't break every time I change language/computer).