> And the last time I really gave it a go, it was slow, which is surprising for a terminal text editor.
There was likely something wrong with your configuration. It's really hard to be faster than vanilla vim, but you can get weird performance issues from external plugins sometimes.
I used some Vim IDE plugins and I assume the bottleneck was there.
The problem is without some IDE-like features, I don't have a need for a text editor. Micro supports LSP servers by default and that gets me pretty far, before jumping to Kate or a real IDE.
The question is which plugins you used. My neovim configuration gives me "IDE-like features", yet it's noticeably faster than VS Code and others. Also, neovim has native support for LSP too.
There was likely something wrong with your configuration. It's really hard to be faster than vanilla vim, but you can get weird performance issues from external plugins sometimes.