I agree. Although the flexibility of configuration is nice, it's sometimes I big turn-off. Personally, I've had a time where loved to configure Vim and Emacs (I've used both extensively). These days I'm using Sublime because I'm overwhelmed and couldn't find the right Emacs plugin equivalent.
By the way, I was using Emacs with vim-mode, obviously ;-)
There was a couple things. In no particular order:
- I never got to have The syntax / Auto-complete / Smart-indent working flawlessly. Sometimes pressing enter would just screw all the indent.. at one point I was so tired that I just deactivated everything and had a "notepad" feeling where I preferred to do everything manually then some plugin just magically alter things I didn't want.
- Quick jump between files never really work as I wanted it. Yes there are some ultra-amazing plugins that do ultra-amazing fuzzy-matching and auto-complete things but all I wanted was a very fast fuzzy-matching goto file/symbol like in Vim/Sublime. I just never got that working. By using a couple of very good Emacs plugin, I almost got it.. but it was very funky with dozen of hacks.
- Copy/Pasting was kinda funky between emacs/terminal/chrome (On Archlinux/Stumpwm). I almost got it to work but for some reasons sometimes it just didn't work. Copy/Pasting is such a basic feature.. when this is not working it's really frustrating. Sometimes I had to copy from emacs, paste in chrome url-bar, re-select it, and then paste it in the terminal.. else it wouldn't work and would just erase my buffer.
- The vim plugin was great but it wasn't well integrated with the overall Emacs workflow (Obviously). In sublime, since the Vim-mode is provided by default (mostly), plugin creators pay particular attention.
- Mixing Html / Javascript / Templating never really worked flawlessly.
So, as you probably noticed, I'm saying flawlessly a lot.. I got much things to work good-enough, but I was tired of them not just working as I wanted it and to fight an eternal battle with spaghetti emacs-lisp code. Whereas with Sublime, yes you have less freedom, but things are overall better integrated and "just work" as I expected them to.
Hopefully people don't take this as a rant. I'd recommend every hackers to give a fair try to both Emacs and Vim. I guess also what happened is that I have less and less time to code with the startups I'm involved with.. so the few hours I have really need to be productive, I can't spend 1-2 hours tweaking the configuration because some buggy indenting plugin is screwing with me.
- I think indentation is one of the things emacs does best tbh.
- For jumping between files, did you try ido-mode?
- Evil in emacs is very well integrated if you're into vim emulation. You can just do package-install evil.
- I don't use html/javascript so I can imagine issues with conflicting major modes or less than ideal minor modes.
I'll be honest, your struggles to me seem somewhat strange but glad you seem to have found something that works for you. Everybody has different requirements. For me, the ability to write lisp to add whatever I want is a huge win (it's really the only reason why I settled on Emacs + Evil over vanilla vim). It's when you code in languages like Haskell or Macaulay that you really start to see Emacs shine.
By the way, I was using Emacs with vim-mode, obviously ;-)