Only if simplex-chat had better UI…

Do you have an image at hand that showcases that layout? The only images I am finding from a little DDG’ing are similar to XMonad’s XMonad.Layout.ThreeColumns, but I am not sure if that is what you are looking for.

XMonad has most of the features you’ve listed though: window swallowing, fake fullscreen (other solutions exist: tabbed layout, fullscreen…), xresources (other solutions exist, just not familiar of them tbh), scratchpad, tags, taffybar and many more features in xmonad-contrib!

What about dwm makes it a more appealing choice compared to XMonad? (Excluding the C vs Haskell argument)

Another (new) Emacs user here, I managed to reduce Emacs startup time to 0.6s - 0.5s on my garbage hardware. Some Emacs users have even manages to reduce the startup time to 0.3 - 0.2 seconds!

Also, launching Emacs in --daemon mode makes creating new frames instantanous and because of it you won’t experience any form of lag when using Emacs!

A wonderful chat application indeed! Wish SimpleX was built with Material You support though.

At this point, it would be insane to classify it as a text editor only. I personally refer to it as the “Emacs distribution”; a distribution that happens to have its own integrated text editor and other useful tools. But a more accurate description is, Emacs is an e-lisp interpreter and because of this it’s a very extensible tool!

If you are an Emacs user, then I suggest you try out Ement.el!