Agree on Emacs. Tried to get into Emacs few times because I am not the biggest fan of VimScript (I use it quite often though). So, I thought that it's worth learning Emacs with a proper Lisp underneath. But I failed everytime and getting back to Vim felt just natural and as easy as turning on my PS4.

One thing with emacs is that some Alt bindings do not work over remote connections. Maybe it was my fault but I could not get all Alt bindings to work.

> One thing with emacs is that some Alt bindings do not work over remote connections. Maybe it was my fault but I could not get all Alt bindings to work.

Were you connecting from a Mac to Linux? Emacs on OS X has Esc as meta by default, which means you need to redefine the meta key to be Alt or else it's basically unusable.

I get the feeling Emacs is where things like Atom and VS Code are looking for a lot of inspiration.

Unfortunately, they used bloated Electron framework.

Little over a year ago I began sketching out a native Mac OS editor, taking ideas from xiki, ia writer, emacs.

The core API was mostly fleshed out. I just got wrapped up in personal life stuff. Might have to take another look at that soon.

I think part of the reason Atom and VS Code use Electron is for cross-platform support. Assuming Github and Microsoft were going for market share, making a native Mac OS editor would somewhat limit their reach.

You're right that emacs without any config is annoying. Check out Prelude (https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude); it's a really nice set of defaults for emacs.

I think emacs is the modern editor in its own spirit: none of the imitations come close.

Recommend you checkout http://spacemacs.org/ It's an emacs with sane defaults and built around Evil (emacs vim plugin)