I have been a user of emacs for more than a decade. I am not a pro, but my config has swollen little by little. What really got me into emacs was the interaction with the python repl. It was amazing. Only Jupyter notebooks did something similar for me. Lately I have been using VScode, as the notebook experience for data science is very good and emacs cannot really compete here as notebooks are web based since the beggining, and vscode is an electron app. Packages like ein was just an ok replacement. Also I have been using logseq instead of org-mode, as the android app is very good and allow me to add stuff from the camera and using the pen with the whiteboard. I am mainly using org-mode to define large project files and leaving logseq for note taking.
The later but the hype with neovim and in much smaller scale with helix got me interest, as I have been using less emacs lately. So I decided to try them. And for the first time I feel I was in the presence of real competitors. Emacs has always been about text editing + poweful ide like tools added using plugins made by the community using a scripting language, in emacs case elisp. I liked VSCode despite the bloat because it was similar in spirit, a editor that can customize and make tools for using a scripting language, javascript. I never like vi/vim. Modal typing is nice for using command without modifier keys. But you could only use those commands on vi /vim, so I did not see the point in learning a typing system for some type saving. I always laugh with the emacs pinky meme, when in practice most vim users used screen and tmux and use ctrl all the time. And alt+tab for geeting to the browser. Plugins were not really enough for my coding and they were awful in comparison with the emacs ecosystem. And you can get evil mode in emacs. But neovim is a different beast. The change from the old vimscript to Lua and how the community embraced the change turn it into an editor very close to emacs. I installed the lazyvim distro, and my experience was very similar to doom emacs. Actually I found a bit better to update all the packages installed by default. And the interaction python was also closer to emacs thanks to iron.nvim. I could installed in a remote machine that I have issue installing a new version of emacs due to lack of permissions. So very nice experience.
Helix is a monolitic editor that comes with "battery include", and it doesn't have a plugin system yet (although the devs might add a scheme like scripting in the future). But the editor is much more feature complete than neovim without plugins. It lacks a repl interaction, so I cannot really use but it looks nice and might have a interesting future.
My conclusion is that editors of all kinds are becoming more and more like emacs, a core with a plugin system. Emacs is a very tiny core and the rest is elisp so you can change everything, but most people never get close to try to do that. Neovim+Lua is a good example that a you don't need so much flexibilty and you don't even need a powerful scripting language. Lua point is to be simple enough without losing too much power. Vscode+JS is a similar story. We are witnessing carcinisation for editors.
