As a long-time Emacs user, I'm surprised by how easy it has become lately to configure Emacs as an IDE, mainly due to the built-in eglot. You need a lot less elisp code than you used to. A working Python setup is like one line of config.

Which is to say, this project isn't really for me, because I'm already familiar with Emacs keybindings. And as for a new user, they're going to eventually have to deal with the underlying configuration. Maybe it's a gateway drug?

I used emacs at school some 15 years ago and I remember it being pretty seemless, I had an OCaml repl for one course and a 68000 emulator with memory inspection for another, and gdb integrated for C ; I do NOT remember hours of configuring that, maybe put some files at the right places and that was it. Switched to vim due to work (that was what's installed on remote machines), kept it for years because of the ubiquity.

More recently in a new gig I'm finally able to install stuff on my machine (with homebrew) and not just work remotely, wanted to revisit my choice between (neo)vim and emacs again, but I guess muscle memory is too strong and still chose the former, although trying emacs I can tell that it is maybe even better polished now with the package manager and everything. Turns out neovim has the same with lazyvim, mason, etc. Just a bit more friction sometimes maybe.

My main pain point right now is the lack of tooling for devops/sre in general. Yes we have LSPs for ansible, groovy, terraform... But they do not cover the entirety of plugins and modules that can be used, and I'm not aware of good tools for testing and debugging. Yes there is teamcity but that needs a license and I can't have that at work apparently. I don't think it is at the editor level though, just the ecosystem is lacking.