No one is arguing that. Just that VSCode is also complex too. But it’s just that out of the box, there’s nothing special. Then you add a few tools through plugins and that’s the extent of of workflow customization most people stay at. If you want more, you have to start a whole new project, and the complexity of that is high while the return is not as good as you can have with emacs/vim.

With emacs/vim, getting started is fairly easy (there’s a tutorial). The learning phase is linear, but it’s just practice and using the software. Creating your own tool is very easy as you can jumpstart from where other’s plugins are and add your own stuff. In VSCode, it’s starting from scatch everytime.

That just highlights some confusion about Emacs. It’s more akinto Unix and the shell as a whole. That’s why I said VM. If you know perl and have a whole host of utils from a unix box, you can script the workflow you want quite easily, especially if you have access to the cpan libraries.

The same thing can happen with emacs. There’s a lot of low level interfaces (network, process,…) and some high level ones regarding the UI. Then there’s a lot of utils andd whole software built with those. All modifiable quite easily. As another commenter had put it, you don’t even need to save a file. You just write some code, eval it, and you have your new feature. If you’re happy with it, you add it to your config or create a new module (very simple). So elisp covers the whole range from simple configuration to whole software.