Emacs had some "premade IDE" project I recall that I tried and wasn't that enthusiastic about.

Doom Emacs, spacemacs, etc.

And there are plenty of nvim "distros" like that (lazyvim for example).

They make getting started pretty easy. I've been using Doom for years and never bothered to make a full config of my own.

If you need an "off the shelf, low effort" IDE then you pick whether you are using VSCode or Vim/Emacs and then go to youtube and google "best plugins for ${LANGUAGE} in ${EDITOR}". And you get basically a minute of copy pasting to have it set up to about the same level of optimization.

Aside from that? The reality is that everything takes time to learn. It took you time to learn your preferred emacs config. It took me time to learn default vim and then what my preferred vim config should be and how to take advantage of it. Just like it took time to learn the editor that came with python on windows for years (still might?).

Which gets back to this being a boomer ass article.

Yes. A much less boomer-coded article would be better.

But as someone who has actually used a lot of the various IDEs over the decades and keeps coming back to vim (and is already expecting to go back to vim within a year because of invasive copilot shit...): Those niche editors? They are either genuinely bad ideas (think TempleOS levels of insanity) or they became plugins for every other IDE. I like vim a lot but emacs is the same (actually emacs is an OS with a text interface but...). And many of those plugins ALSO exist for vscode and atom/sublime and so forth.

Because good (uncopyrighted...) ideas propagate. That is development and design.

I have a colleague who is really into Rick and Morty and has colorful hair. He's one of those who has a pink/purple theme with little to no contrast. I keep my distance.

I use the cyberpunk theme in visual studio professional and it’s pretty easy to read the text.

I want contrast

Sure, but you can also have contrast with a dark background that isn't constantly shooting a third of the photons your screen can generate (or more, since in some screens blue pixels are the largest), and the most energetic at that, at your eyes... high contrast themes tend to have a black background (not a gray one like most dark themes) precisely as a way to maximise contrast...

(It was even worse when we sat all day in front of a fucking particle accelerator, of course; frankly, as much as I loved CRTs' ability to work with multiple resolutions I don't know how we didn't all end up going blind...)

I cannot find a good combination of colors that works well for me.

the text needs to reedable