alt Hacker NewsI don't know about emacs, but its definitely doable in neovim. I don't know if the built in file explorer suits your needs, but now that nvim has a proper built in plugin manager, it's just one line of config to install neo-tree or something like that.
`neo-tree` is indeed close to what I'd love to see in a real text-mode IDE. I'm going to play around with it.