I think a big difference is that in the end emacs often makes a call and adopts one of the very popular packages to the core - eglot, modus-themes, use-package - there are certainly more, and more will come. It may not make everyone happy, but is sets the baseline - e.g., I am using eglot as package manager, but I wrap it into use-package commands for compatibility reasons.
No such thing exist in neovim (or at least in times when I was using it), so that churn never ends. Also I find, that neovim ecosystem is concentrated on one (very productive) developer in an unhealthy manner - folke often takes time off and half the packages one uses stands still.
But in the end, while I like neovim, I also find that emacs ecosystem has better ideas - which-key, embark do not stop to amuse me (I will not comment on whether it is a good thing for a text editor). I also do not like lua and actively dislike the experience of debugging and configuring neovim with it (maybe less of an issue with LLM these days).
In my experience, running in a terminal absolutely adds a bunch of rendering/performance issues and all kind of surprising failures with hotkeys.
> emacs often makes a call and adopts one of the very popular packages to the core
> No such thing exist in neovim
neovim has been doing that too. Plugin manager (vim.pack), treesitter stuff, LSP management, completion, comments, etc.
> which-key
neovim also has this.
> neovim ecosystem is concentrated on one (very productive) developer in an unhealthy manner
folke has nice stuff, but I find a lot of it is largely unnecessary and bloated. The only thing I use is his which-key, and there are alternatives, such as mini.clue.
There is no "problem" in emacs (there are big technical problems, but not this one) and no need to get "most people" on emacs - the ecosystem is healthy by all means and only increasing.
The "out of the box" experience could be better - but for emacs users. Those, who expect VS Code, should just install it and live happy.
It is absolutely not true, I've vibecoded an app for myself in CL and opus/sonnet had 0 problems with parens and types. Add to it an MCP to work with REPL and it is much more smooth than Go in my experience.
It may feel even more shallow, but what keeps me on emacs are modus-themes. With luck, you can find a passable theme in your editor/ide of choice, but to find a good, high-contrast light theme is almost impossible.
> but there's a reason I use IDEA Ultimate to write code now.
IDEA is so painfully slow that while I have it paid by my company I cannot force myself to work in it for extended periods of time. And I say it being fully aware of Emacs's speed problems. Also, the limitation on "1 Window - 1 Project" is laughable in IDEA, as well as in VSCode.
IDEA can certainly get slow, but `esc 10000 c-x e` still means I'm hitting abort before it gets even close to done. I use multiple panes/windows in IDEA all the time, and it also supports opening tabs in new windows/frames.
I have just opened a 7k loc JS file in idea and I can observe for at least 2 seconds how syntax fontification and all the hints are applied and rendered. All of it on a macbook M4. It is not acceptable and also the slowest of any editor I've used.
It uses that time to parse the source into an AST and build a search index to provide type-aware symbol search, information for autocomplete and refactoring if you request it, etc. Sure it will be slower than simply highlighting the code and then doing nothing with it...
If you use IDEA as a glorified text editor, you're using less than 1% of what it's capable of. It's a complete waste of computing resources then.
I think the contention is that emacs stalls and stutters running a macro on a medium sized file while IDEA sings. I find IDEA to be slower than emacs as a whole but overall more full-featured and much better out of the box. I'm an emacs fan myself, but think IDEA is a great IDE.
> the limitation on "1 Window - 1 Project" is laughable in IDEA
There's no such limitation in IDEA. If your project consists of separate subprojects stored in subdirectories inside a single large directory, just open that directory in IDEA. Your subdirectories will work/look/feel like different projects, all within the same window, with global symbol search, support for attaching SQL resolution scopes (i.e. attaching different databases to different projects and/or paths within them and having correct autocomplete), etc.
One of the things I work on is such a project built from a dozen separate subprojects, some of them written in Java, one in PHP, one in JS/node, one in TS/React, two in Go, one in Python. Plus the usual stuff like Markdown, HTML, CSS, SQL, etc. It all integrates very nicely within the same window.
If they're stored in completely separate directories, and you want to combine them into a single window for some reason, it's still perfectly possible by attaching them as "modules" inside your project settings. It looks and feels exactly like the first case, even when projects are spread across the system.
My car (a VW) has adaptive light with zoning, which seems to work well - at least no one is flashing me! But in general, modern cars are a black box - the light is always on, everything runs on automatics, there is no height adjustment anymore. I mostly have to rely on it working as intended.
No such thing exist in neovim (or at least in times when I was using it), so that churn never ends. Also I find, that neovim ecosystem is concentrated on one (very productive) developer in an unhealthy manner - folke often takes time off and half the packages one uses stands still.
But in the end, while I like neovim, I also find that emacs ecosystem has better ideas - which-key, embark do not stop to amuse me (I will not comment on whether it is a good thing for a text editor). I also do not like lua and actively dislike the experience of debugging and configuring neovim with it (maybe less of an issue with LLM these days).
In my experience, running in a terminal absolutely adds a bunch of rendering/performance issues and all kind of surprising failures with hotkeys.
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