winner-mode was new to me. Thanks! The most annoying thing about Emacs for me is random windows popping up; I'm a "separate frames" person (the OS window manager does fine for me, I don't need much help from Emacs), and anything that streamlines windows is great.

then here's another just for you!

  ;;from https://github.com/m2ym/popwin-el
  ;; prevents annoying popup buffers/windows
  (require 'popwin)
  (popwin-mode 1)

> (the OS window manager does fine for me, I don't need much help from Emacs)

Embrace the power of "and": EXWM.

I have switched to treemacs a while ago (for a file/project explorer), and it's really powerful and mature, with interesting features like "workspaces", which allow you to have multiple directory views (which can be anywhere on your disk), and is managed with a convenient Org mode configuration (I wish more Emacs packages had nice Org-based configuration systems like this).

I have tried neo-tree and undo-tree. But never really got around to using them well. Maybe, I need to be patient.

Neo tree was annoying to me (coming from NERDTree). I remapped things to work like NERDTree ('l' for open? should be o!). And then I finally grokked how much simpler it was to navigate directories with hjkl. Plus ? to see how to manipulate files and just keep it there is great. Way more ergonomic than NERDTree or Treemacs imho.

Also since I'm going on here, I've found the key to editor management is to make sure certain basics work across the board (for IntelliJ/, Xcode/Xvim, (space)emacs and even vim - sometimes I use vim for config changes since it's so fast to open, tmux, etc).

  C-o/C-i -> should work for navigation
  ctrl-shift-j -> should select the file you're working on
  ; ->  should map to : (retrain yourself)
  fd -> escape (retrain yourself)
  c-hjkl -> c-w hjkl (faster window/panel navigation)
  gd -> should go to definition
  vim text motion in general should work flawlessly
    e.g., @q - should start to record a macro

I use spacemacs + tmux since I like to customize and it's easiest to customize in elisp I've found than in any other IDE or vim itself. And when things don't work and I can't make it work in the editor itself, I fix it in the terminal app (Kitty) or the OS (BetterTouchTool).

Shameless plug for those curious:

https://github.com/p10q/home/blob/master/.spacemacs#L343 https://github.com/p10q/home/blob/master/kitty.conf#L797

I find undo-tree to be super useful in rare occasions, thanks to undo-tree-visualizer-toggle-diff bound on d.

The quick diffs can be pretty darn helpful with complex changes.

An alternative to winner-mode is eyebrowse, for anyone interested.

I use treemacs instead of neo-tree, love it.