Strongly disagree, but I am in a niche field, Linux kernel development. Emacs is really struggling with it's tools. But for Neovim: the plugins and good keycombos are absolutely essential to get certain functionality for my productivity.
* rg with telescope window to quickly find text in very large code basis is essential.
* Pressing spc, spc, to bring up a telescope window of my open buffers and typing in text to narrow them, very important.
* To date I still struggle to get the LSP to work the Linux kernel on VSCode, but on Neovim I got it working.
IDE's have a lot of menu clutter that I struggle to make good use of-most programmers working on user-space apps, it is likely fine, but for the kernel, we often need more control.
First I've heard of this. As a long-time vanilla Emacs user, I'm using consult-ripgrep and rg-project for ripgrep interfaces, consult-buffer for fast buffer and file switching, Eglot for LSP integration (mainly with clangd), etc. I've also got org-mode for note taking, magit for speedy Git manipulation, etc.
And all without any visible menus or clutter.
I suspect that a power Emacs user and a power Neovim user are more akin here to each other than to VS Code users.
I mostly use kickstart.nvim in Neovim. I really like using mnemonic key bindings (which do show a menu) with the functionality above. One real issue was the lack of a telescope competitor (and I noticed you did not mention one above). I really like the quick overlay for those actions is how Telescope in kickstart is programmed. I really do not like the results smushed at the bottom of the screen like how Doom handles it.
Spacemacs got me into mnemonic key bindings, but it was too buggy and development had slowed. I got some things working with Doom Emacs, but it had a lot of bugs as well. Part of that reason is projectile also seemed to no longer be worked on. They were converting over to project.el but that seems to be slow.
I struggle to find good bundles for Emacs. Doom Emacs is struggling with migrating their plugins. Most programmers I know use Emacs with few plugins and not the better IDE like plugins in Neovim.
* rg with telescope window to quickly find text in very large code basis is essential.
* Pressing spc, spc, to bring up a telescope window of my open buffers and typing in text to narrow them, very important.
* To date I still struggle to get the LSP to work the Linux kernel on VSCode, but on Neovim I got it working.
IDE's have a lot of menu clutter that I struggle to make good use of-most programmers working on user-space apps, it is likely fine, but for the kernel, we often need more control.