[NoGravitas]

I've used Emacs for 30 years, and I have no intention of ever giving it up, but IMO this is somewhat accurate. The package installation and configuration story on Emacs has gotten a lot better over the last ten years or so, but there really ought to be a kind of meta package installer and configurator that does exactly what VSCode does: when it finds a file that it doesn't handle specially but for which there is an existing package or set of packages, install those packages and configure them with reasonable defaults.

Spacemacs does this, which is the main nice thing about it. Unfortunately, it also carries a lot of other baggage rather than just doing this.

[brabel]

Emacs Prelude[1] does exactly that.

It comes with very few extra packages installed, but when you try to open a file in a certain language, it will offer to install a set of "standard" packages for you that enable support for it.

[1] https://prelude.emacsredux.com/en/latest/

[AzzieElbab]

- I've used Emacs for 30 years, and I have no intention of ever giving it up - why? I hear it is much easier to quit then vim :)

[vidarh]

I gave up emacs by writing my own editor... I realised I could write one in fewer lines than my emacs config...

[NoGravitas]

I have noticed that on average, I throw out my emacs config and start from scratch every ten years or so.