I'm going to post it as a reply to my comment, so it's not a mistake that this is here.

I notice my comment being downvoted, and that's fine. I don't really care- but my statement stands; it's a far better use of your time to learn JavaScript and write extensions in VS Code to accomplish what you want. I realize this might get flagged and someone might be offended. I don't have patience today.

My JavaScript advice is multi-fold:

- You'll learn a language that's in active use and development, and the lingua franca of the web.

- You'll learn how extensions are created for VS Code, one of the most popular text editor and the greatest reach for sharing your work if you desire that.

- JavaScript is *fast*, Emacs is slow ; there are many other language problems that, shockingly, JavaScript is just better with.

- Waste less time debugging your text editor; not all of us (especially myself) have time to sink into becoming experts at Emacs. Emacs documentation is a bit esoteric and not that easy to grok, unless you already know ELisp.

- Need an off-the-shelf solution? VS Code most likely has that, and it's probably going to work

- Don't waste your time with dogma. EMacsers get in a tizzy fit over this and that, the right way to do things, to RTFM, etc. It's a community that has almost the same level of toxicity as Linux users.

I am someone who went all-in with Emacs for around 6 months. It is really an interesting piece of software and no one will deny that it can ostensibly do alot. One of the biggest issues I had was writing any form of prose - which made it lag so badly, it was nearly impossible to scroll. The collective solution, after posting on Reddit and searching via Google, was simply to use search - rather than scrolling to find what you're looking for.

I find manipulating buffers in Emacs fairly tedious, and I still believe that the mouse is a great invaluable tool not to be shunned. Some things are just easier and faster to manipulate with a pointer. I don't have a problem reaching for my mouse and returning to the keyboard without looking.

I tried to use it for journalling, and learning the ins-and-outs of Org-mode was fun. I liked org-capture. Then I realized, Obsidian was a better piece of tool. It handles prose just fine, and Markdown is much easier to remember (due to its ubiquitiness) than org-mode. And guess what languages extensions are written in? JavaScript.

Other comments:

> Writing functions in elisp is much easier than having to write JS for electron-based editors, and the elisp you write will usually work for a long time without being modified.

Old JS code still work. JS has a reputation for being backwards compatible and taking a very long time to break any type of ABI. In the case of Electron, you are informed when things break - and you have time to update it. It's not like code changes happen under your feet, and things are breaking all of the time. [0] On top of that, Electron-based applications are almost guaranteed to work similarly on Windows, Mac and Linux. The same can't be said for Emacs, which suffer some fairly extreme performance issues on Windows.

> VS Code looks so boring in comparison.

It's just a tool. I can use themes, and syntax highlighting is great.

> but nvim and the like still suffer from being just text editors

And this is what makes it perfectly suited for its task.

> In Emacs, this is all very easy.

What makes emacs very easy? Every time I see anyone say Emacs is easy - they gush about writing code in ELisp, it's almost dogmatic. It's not about Emacs, it's about *ELisp*. I do believe the majority of Emacsers suffer from the IKEA effect[1] because the learning curve is so high that by the time they're able to build something in ELisp - they're also hit over the head with the Stockholm Syndrome[2].

My preferred solution would be to use an SQLite plugin in VS Code because that allows me to browse and query any code, rather than a fixed string. I don't need to write a new function, or try to manipulate Emacs buffers.

> Alternately, spend a weekend learning VS.Code and get on with doing real work.

Exactly my perspective.

[0] https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/breaking-changes

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome