I actually like `nvim --clean`, which is just the basics. Early on in the Neovim project, a lot of heirloom defaults were changed to be more modern, resulting in a better (IMHO) out-of-the-box experience. I use `nvim --clean` as my man-page viewer:

  MANPAGER=nvim --clean -c "colo sorbet" +Man!

Startup speed is blistering.

My current config is pretty stable, and not that large. But if it were causing issues, I'd seriously consider only doing LSP setup, which is not that onerous with the latest APIs (it was already fairly easy with `vim.lsp.start`, but `vim.lsp.config` and `vim.lsp.enable` make it easier still: https://neovim.io/doc/user/lsp.html).

Emacs seems to be a local maximum that is difficult to overcome. An entire Lisp Machine environment would be better, but it would be a tremendous undertaking and the specialists, i.e. emacs devs, don't seem to be interested in such a thing.

A multithreaded version of emacs would also be an interesting addition; I read some arguments against moving emacs to a multithreaded model, but I don't really remember them.

There’s (arguably) an argument to be made that Emacs configuration distributions fit that niche - Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, and Prelude provide varying flavours for different kinds of Emacs users.

Apart from that, I don’t really know what an application would be to Emacs as nvim is to Vim. It’s more like nvim is to Vim what Emacs is to nano, except Emacs came first.

Let's not forget that GNU Emacs also had his competitor, XEmacs which spurred GNU Emacs to improve. Similar with GCC and EGCS where the EGCS later became the new GCC.

This already happened, decades ago. Xemacs was widely deployed for a while. For that matter, vim is the most popular of several editors that did this to vi. (Elvis, stevie, nvi, others probably.) At any rate, I think Xemacs is still more or less maintained, but I haven’t seen anybody use it in decades.

sacrificing all existing elisp code makes a new editor worthless, maintaining compatibility makes it extraordinarily hard to get anywhere.

StackOverflow isn't representative. It was always skewed towards .NET world (and thus VS). I assume this is the case because the founders were prominent .NET personalities.

What this doesn't show is people using vscode/vs with neovim driver or vim key bindings. The vim "backend" percentage is going to be significant.

I don't think you can add them, respondents could select multiple editors. I am guessing 34% is the upper limit if no Neovim users use Vim and vice versa, which is hard to believe.

This feels like it's skewed by the question: "Which development environments did you use". I know that vim is an IDE, but I still think of it as a text editor. I would probably answer "Zed" to that question (not even on the list!) and "vim" to a "Which text editor" question, although I use a third, graphical editor (CotEditor) for a lot of stuff too. I never use a full-blown 'ide' like visual studio.

I wonder why is Spacemacs listed as a separate entry?

You could probably lump PyCharm and IntelliJ together; different language modes of effectively the same editor.

I'm pleasantly surprised Notepad++ is so high up.

More like top-200+ by views, though even the wouldn’t contradict much else