> I get that emacs and vim can be customized but there is arguably room for improvement. There is, of course, always room for improvement, but I think you are

> I get that emacs and vim can be customized but there is arguably room for improvement. There is, of course, always room for improvement, but I think you are selling Emacs short here. Emacs is roughly 85% lisp, which is what you write to extend it. Not only do you have access to everything the core parts of the editor have access to, you can jump to the source of any editor function to see how it works. Since most of it is written in Lisp, you can assume that it has been dogfooded to death. Lisp is very much a first class citizen. And practically every public function is documented, and that documentation is just a keystroke away (C-h f). When you launch Emacs with no filename it even dumps you into the "scratch" buffer, which is really just a lisp repl. Everything about Emacs is geared toward not just customization, but full on extensibility. Emacs also now has all the stuff you'd expect—browsing, downloading, upgrading extensions (called "packages"). It also supports customizing the editor without writing any lisp code (M-x customize-*) if you don't want to be forced to learn lisp right away.