I do not doubt that they are. I use Emacs with a simple config as the default editor to open files with, but I do not know elisp to set up something more feature-rich, and have not felt the need to yet, but I would like to try some day. It is a truly unique piece of software with lots of love put into it, and it is also GPL which I like. The problem is just that the defaults are painful and I want to know exactly what my elisp is doing, and this would take some work. Yes I know that Spacemacs and Doom Emacs exist.
But my comment (the phrasing could be clearer) was about the choice of TUI vs GUI if one was to start creating a new IDE today, in response to the parent comment:
> With enough effort and care, a frictionless experience can be made with a TUI should some "Jetbrains" come along and try to make a commercial product out of it.
In such a case my preference would be to have a decoupled architecture which would allow for both. You can make such nice things with today's computing power and graphics cards, that it would be a shame to not take advantage of it. And the performance can be stellar. We are talking TFLOPS nowadays.
I think you are missing out the part where it's technology developed continuously for almost half a century.
VSCode is very nice, but I quickly become frustrated by it's lag in comparison.
It does beats the pants of every other GUI IDE out there, with JetBrains IDEs coming a significant second place.
But Vim or Emacs with LSP are extremely capable IDEs and have unmatched speed compared to any GUI IDE you can name.