Emacs buffer management and Git integration is excellent for the use cases you describe. Doom Emacs is a great starter kit if you know the absolute basics of vi

Emacs buffer management and Git integration is excellent for the use cases you describe. Doom Emacs is a great starter kit if you know the absolute basics of vim cursor movement. Your workflow sounds particular, if you want to upload hodgepodges of multiple branches to various environments manually. But I think you could do the same kind of thing pretty well with lsyncd + git-worktree with a checkout for each environment, plus additional checkouts for whatever you're developing. Check out a different version of a file in the worktree associated with staging, and lsyncd automatically syncs that change to staging. (It sounds like VSCode serves you very well for now, so I'm not urging you to change or anything. Just thinking aloud about some alternatives and what using them might look like for use cases similar to yours.)