Unfortunately, it’s for the best. If you’re serious about research you have to present yourself. Especially if you’re the first person to discover it, you’re the most - possibly only - qualified person to talk about that thing.

Part of scientific communication is giving elevator talks. You have to be able to argue for funding.

Not to mention, if you never develop those skills, you’re just opening yourself up to getting a worse financial incentive for the same amount of work

I’ve tried a few IDEs, mainly Microsoft ones as of recently, but I still prefer my neospacevim setup. Microsoft has a very nice debugger and other useful features for navigating large software projects, but even on my 3080 12th Gen i7 rig with 32GB the plugins I use end up slowing things down. Plus, a similar debugger interface can normally be found in an init.toml layer

With neospacevim, I can specify which plugins get loaded for which file types, so my LaTeX plugins don’t interfere with my Python plugins for example.

Also the macro language locks me into vim, I even installed vimium keybinds for my browser. Spacevim is nice because you can see all the available keybinds option trees by pressing Space.

I mentioned spacevim/SpacEmacs because your post focused on emacs/vim, if you do choose either to make an IDE in I would imagine SpacEmacs/spacevim might be a little closer to an IDE than a text editor.

Spacevim is nice because it will auto install packages declared in the init.toml, sometimes with vanilla vim or neovim you need a plugin manager installed separately

I like Spacevim a lot (inspired by SpacEmacs), you can use neovim as the underlying vim package as well. Then update init.toml with whatever layers/plugins you want