A thoughtful essay. I find myself frustrated with Sublime Text these days, and as a former (novice) vim user, I’ve been debating if I should go for VSCode like all the young guns these days or commit to Doom Emacs to leverage a solid initial setup and my vim memory and fully embrace libre route, which are a little more aligned with my values (although not to the degree of RMS). I remain oddly indecisive.

Its barrier to entry is very low, so you don't need to invest a lot of time to find out whether it's going to be productive for you. It's a real usability jump over older IDEs.

I've switched from a combo of, mostly, Intellij IDEA and Vim to almost exclusively VScode (for development). I do still use Spacemacs just for org mode.

> my vim memory

There are vim compatibility plugins for VScode.

> fully embrace libre route

VScode is open source and MIT licensed, here's the repo: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode

Someone would need to explain to me what values I'm forgoing in order to use this. Although I should warn that someone I'm likely to have a strong rebuttal.