> From what I understand, the main difference is that with Emacs you can start hacking any part of the environment right from the start. It's designed to be pla

> From what I understand, the main difference is that with Emacs you can start hacking any part of the environment right from the start. It's designed to be played with. I think you nailed the big difference right there. I mostly use vim but configuring the editor is a gateway to programming new functionality. You start small by defining a function bound to a key. Then you start exploring more of the api and gluing functions together. Eventually you refactor it a bit if you find it worth sharing. I've only used emacs for a bit and I understand it has more of that "OS" aspect to it where people stay in their editor for a lot of tasks that are more than just"edit text". But like vim, users can tweak functionality in a relatively accessible and not overly-limiting way. And they are introduced to this early on. I've used vs code. It's pretty. It works well. I have the impression that to change functionality I either have to hope it already exists as a toggle somewhere or go read how to write a full vs code extension. At least in my experience, it lacks the incremental aspect described above.