All this looks really great, however I think I just can't deal with the effort of maintaining these complex editor configurations anymore.

I've been a multi-decade Vim user, until I switched to VSCode last year. It made me realize how much better the user experience can be for an editor. I had all kinds of complex vim configurations and plugins with special cases for linux vs. mac, server vs. desktop, GUI vs. terminal, all of which are a huge pain in the butt to maintain.

If there was one thing I could ask of Vim (or even emacs), it'd be a consistent high-quality default user experience.

(Ofcourse, the default experience in VSCode isn't perfect either, but it took me four lines in settings.json and four plugins (vim, go, eslint, clang) for a near-perfect experience.)

Weird. I built my .rc files like 10 years ago, and only edit them about twice a year to add a plugin or modify a keybinding. Not a pain to maintain at all.

How do you store them? Just backup into a dotfiles repo or what? I've been looking into dotfiles + gnu stow.

I store them in a dotfiles repo that gets pushed to Github occasionally. They get symlinked to my home directory, and I use thoughtbot's rcm[0] tool for managing that. Then I just use a small script that I keep updated to handle installation and setup on a fresh computer. I'll need to take a look at gnu stow now. It seems like it'd be a slightly simpler alternative, and would keep my dotfiles folder a bit better organized.

0. https://github.com/thoughtbot/rcm