Agreed (though I use Kakoune).

With that said, first class integration around a shell could definitely make me change editors. As much as I like terminal editors, it's a very limited medium to write an editor. I imagine a Vim/Kakoune/Emacs/etc could be written in a GUI and have even more features yet still retain first class focus on keyboard UX.

Check out Oni: https://github.com/onivim/oni It's under heavy development, wouldn't recommend it at the moment but it looks promising.

Wow that is amazing looking!

Makes me want to make something like that for Kakoune! Wonder if Oni will ever get to the state where you could write different backends for it; ie emacs, kakoune, etc.

This looks amazing and exactly what I want if I didn't suck with vim.

you mean....like emacs?

I'm confused, isn't emacs in the shell? Are you saying that emacs is a gui editor?

I was talking about GUI editors. I already use a term editor. I even game an example of vim/kakoune/emacs, ie, term editors.

Emacs is a gui editor. It has a shell mode, but it's primarily supposed to be used through the GUI. GUI Emacs is literally everything you described looking for above - an advanced GUI with more features than you could evere learn, yet one that still retains first class focus on keyboard UX.

That's interesting, I'll give it a look! Granted, I'm a big lover of Kakoune and vim-style modal editing.

In your opinion, what does Emacs GUI do that a terminal (or emacs in term) doesn't do well? Ie, how is it best exploiting the GUI aspect?

Sorry for the late reply. I'm actually a huge fan of modal editing as well, can't live without it, so I use evil - and it's perfect. GUI emacs does everything that any other IDE does, and that's what I like so much about it. With vim or any of it's GUIs, normal IDE features feel like "duct tape" on top of the program. Whereas, emacs was meant to be used in this context. I mean, for example, when programming in C I can even use emacs to debug (it has a GUI for gdb). And those kind of advanced IDE features are available for any language. Not even touching the fact it's just a lisp machine and you can build any kind of program you want in it, it takes extensibility to the next level with a lisp dialect that's relatively easy to learn, whereas extensibility in vim is limited to googling for vimscript code someone else wrote (unless you take the time to learn vimscript shudders). Emacs gave me everything you said you were looking for, at a time when I was looking for those exact things. I wanted a modal editor like vim that actually was an IDE, had IDE features, and was completely extensible. Emacs checks all of those boxes.

If you're a vimmer and want to start out with emacs, try spacemacs. I used it for a year before building my own emacs config. It's an incredible program, won't take you long to get running if you're used to vim, and after a week I'd bet you'll have a hard time going back to gVim.

Emacs has a GUI version with gorgeous fonts, images and everything. Vim also has a gui version, though it's not as good. I think neo-vim has a few gui front ends as well.

Believe me, I wish I spent more time getting familiar with vim to enjoy that workflow. The bottleneck in programming something is very rarely my typing speed though.