Been using Emacs for over 15 years and, now you mention it, I guess that is why. At the time it was normal for people to use a different IDE per language and these would be littered with buttons, menus, tabs etc. I thought this was ridiculous so looked into vim and Emacs. Emacs is obviously better so I made my config completely distraction-free (which is trivial to do).

Now 99% of my window is the text I'm editing (two lines reserved for modeline and minibuffer). Nothing pops up or makes its presence known until the moment I need it. Tabs are a good example. I often have close to a hundred files "open" in Emacs but I don't need to know about them until the moment I'm ready to switch to one.

I was 10 years ahead of VS Code taking off but when I look at that I still see a bunch of useless distractions taking up valuable screen space.

With a built-in psychoanalyzer!

RMS -vs- Doctor, on the evils of Natalism:

http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...

I use vscode in neovim mode, but it does have a habit of "notifying" me about everything. Whose idea was it for there to be a marginal popup repeating everything I do?

I do a thing, and there's the popup "hey, you did a thing!" Stop it...