If you use an editor or IDE at work for a year, you might work with it for a thousand hours that first year alone. But a noisy GUI like VSCode's is optimized for just that first 30 minutes of playing around.

For me, at least, that kind of thing doesn't end up being very enjoyable long-term.

> the lisp machine

I wonder whether this was intentional or a coincidence, but for others (and maybe you) the "Lisp Machine" was a real hardware architecture unrelated to emacs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine