Moreover it is supported out-of-the-box in emacs: `M-x list-packages`.
I think `:packadd` or something may be the equivalent for vim.
FWIW you _can_ get emacs to launch as quickly as, say, vi, and to respond to input as quickly as just typing in the terminal (but in my experience the default GUI doesn't have noticeable input latency):
* `emacs -nw` will launch emacs in a terminal rather than a OS-native GUI window. This has surprisingly little impact on the interface or usability, but it does make cosmetic tweaks like font-rendering more difficult.
* `emacs --daemon` will start an "emacs server" process running in the background, and `emacsclient` will connect a UI instance to it (so you don't need to re-process all your .emacs stuff each time)
That said you can probably introduce a lot of input latency by hooking a slow method to the keypress event, but that applies to Atom and VSCode as well as emacs. But all three of them seem to do OK suggesting auto-completions of one kind or another, which must be handled on keydown or similar, so maybe that's not as critical as I assume.
I usually have a text editor open all the time anyway (recently Atom, lately VSCode) so the time-to-launch isn't that big of a deal in practice (and isn't _that_ large to begin with) but I am disproportionately, irrationally annoyed every time I need to wait for the editor to start.
Or just use the menu; click on "Options” → “Manage Emacs Packages”. No need to scare people with “M-x” weirdness right out of the gate when it isn’t necessary since the option is right there in the menu.
But seriously you raise a good point. The OS-native menus in aquaemacs and similar go a long way toward making emacs more accessible and explore-able.
No joke, it is legitimately hard for a newbie to figure out how to close emacs, which is pretty ridiculous. (It's `C-x C-c` btw, but I honestly don't know how a first-time user could figure that out on their own without a menu. You need to be _told_. It's absolutely crazy that you need to consult the manual to know how it exit the program.)
> Very minor feature. It is not usefull unless you are constantly hunting for new languages.
The big advantage isn't just installing but keeping them up to date without any actual effort. I used to know vimscript, used to understand how the vim package managers I used works and all. With VSCode I don't even know in which language are extenssions written.
I work mostly on golang, and now the environment is certainly more stable, but I remember that in order to have go extensions working on vim I used to have to be updating manually the extensions pretty much every release and it was some effort. Now I update the golang version and things just work.
Most of that is because the Go ecosystem moved ahead. Five years ago something like vim-go would depend on maybe 15 different binaries that operated on the source code. Automatically updating all of that is possible, but somewhat slow and tricky (especially because there were no modules yet, so had to "go get -u" all these different binaries to check for updates).
Now, it's basically just gopls. You don't even need vim-go any more; just Vim + $any_lsp + gopls gives a very similar experience.
Very minor feature. It is not usefull unless you are constantly hunting for new languages.
>Not to mention that VSCode has countless other productivity boosters built in which would require plugin hunting or fiddling with configuration files for Vim and Emacs.
This is only true if you are comparing default vim/emacs to VSCode, which would be quite unfair. Compare it to some vim/emacs distributions and list the differences.