For me, I really want to get into niri, but the lack of XWayland support scares me (I know there’s solutions, but I don’t understand them yet).
Also, I stopped using Emacs (even though I love its design and philosophy with my whole heart) because it’s very slow, even as a daemon.
Have you tried zed? Written in rust, has many extensions. I gave it a try, I quite like it. It’s blazing fast. But I haven’t tried on an old machine.
I haven’t, but I have heard of it. I think parts of Lapce are based on some Zed algorithms.