I’ve tried a few IDEs, mainly Microsoft ones as of recently, but I still prefer my neospacevim setup. Microsoft has a very nice debugger and other useful features for navigating large software projects, but even on my 3080 12th Gen i7 rig with 32GB the plugins I use end up slowing things down. Plus, a similar debugger interface can normally be found in an init.toml layer

With neospacevim, I can specify which plugins get loaded for which file types, so my LaTeX plugins don’t interfere with my Python plugins for example.

Also the macro language locks me into vim, I even installed vimium keybinds for my browser. Spacevim is nice because you can see all the available keybinds option trees by pressing Space.

I mentioned spacevim/SpacEmacs because your post focused on emacs/vim, if you do choose either to make an IDE in I would imagine SpacEmacs/spacevim might be a little closer to an IDE than a text editor.

Spacevim is nice because it will auto install packages declared in the init.toml, sometimes with vanilla vim or neovim you need a plugin manager installed separately

I like Spacevim a lot (inspired by SpacEmacs), you can use neovim as the underlying vim package as well. Then update init.toml with whatever layers/plugins you want