You mean something like which-key? It existed for a long time as an external package and was added to main emacs recently. https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/commit/fa4203300fde682...

onivim also seperated the core functionality of the vim editor into a seperate library libvim , this would have been great for other people looking to make their own gui frontend to vim .

neovim does not give a libneovim, but exposes an rpc where you communicate with neovim running as another process, this I would have thought have more latency but apparently is fast enough , this is how the vscode plugin for neovim is able to provide a near complete vim experience. Other neovim guis like neovide use this too

Which joint issues? Have you tried evil mode?

What kind of remote functionality? Lately, somebody mentioned https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/tunnels

Emacs already does that with TRAMP via SSH -- You just open a file like /ssh:user@server:/etc/hosts the main downside is if your connection is laggy Emacs will lock up momentarily. There is an ongoing effort to improve the multithreaded-ness and async-ness of Emacs to make it nicer

There is TRAMP.

https://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/

I am not sure if it will fit your needs or not.

I believe the analogous thing in emacs is called TRAMP. I have no idea if it's good, as I never edit files remotely, but it exists.

In fairness, Emacs has long had cua-mode for rebinding C-c, C-v, C-x, and C-z to copy, paste, cut, and undo, so at least those changes are not too radical.

Switching the default experience away from what people have grown used to over decades seems incredibly rude (despite what commercial software has normalized).

The magic of emacs is infinite customizability. And it's quite easy for users to find and start with emacs "distributions" or "starter packs". So that's probably the best route forward.

Potential improvements:

1 Base emacs continues to make it easier to try out a bunch of configurations and switch between them, obviating solutions like chemacs

2 There's a web repository of a a variety of starter packs with screenshots and reviews and installation instructions, to help beginners find everything in one place.

3 ...

I'm afraid that many people consider "looking the same as decades ago" a feature...

Please, no. Emacs could use some interface/toolkit update, I don't deny that. And I like IDE features. I use tree-sitter, LSPs, copilot.el, copilot-chat.el, and others all day, every day.

But don't force me to turn off treemacs, and minimap like I have to do in VSCode all the time just because some useless, space-wasting eye-candy is trendy.

A huge portion of the emacs community seems resistant to any UI improvement. I think it's a counterculture thing.