Try Doom Emacs. You can turn off evil-mode and tweak init.el to get most packages out-of-the-box, even all the language server mode-stuff of VSCode. Check which

Try Doom Emacs. You can turn off evil-mode and tweak init.el to get most packages out-of-the-box, even all the language server mode-stuff of VSCode. Check which dependencies are needed and find out how to install them most cleanly, either using distro packages, nix, git, go, stack (for Haskell), npm, and the like. You can reconfigure keybindings so you get cut/copy/paste and everything you need, exactly how you need it. It's going to take a week, but should be stable after that, and you'll realize you could've theoretically done it in hours if you knew enough, which you now do. The Doom-part takes out 95% of needed configuration and makes it more ready-made for usage. It also looks and works like a modern IDE, but you scale it how you like it and have minimal annoyances to turn off. VSCode has its own shenanigans, of constant updates, configurations, java/scala is a mess to set up, telemetry, proprietary extensions, etc. So deeper work is anyways going to need investments also there, but there's also lock-in to the eco-system and thus less freedom.