7890yuiop

Ok. Mine doesn't, but I'll believe yours does. Why is that making it hard to for you to share it between machines?

the configuration contains a lot of junk

What do you mean? What is the specific problem?

I don't know, but the initial denote release for Emacs was barely 16 months ago, so it would be fairly surprising if anyone had written support for another editor so quickly.

Maybe if you define a minimum set of features which would be adequate for collaboration purposes, you could ask in vim forums how you might go about implementing those.

You're matching the literal text :init|config|custom

Tip: Use M-x re-builder to test.

C-h f message to add to the *Messages* buffer (C-h e to jump to that).

If Emacs will start a long-running process and react whenever there's new output, then you'll want to see C-h i g (elisp)Asynchronous Processes and C-h i g (elisp)Output from Processes. (n.b. I've added a couple of other notes to my initial reply, too.)

Tell us how you run that external program outside of Emacs, and we can show you how to run it inside Emacs.

Then it's just a matter of timers and a variable in your mode-line-format. Note that your variable will need the risky-local-variable in order to show text properties (for the colour). See C-h i g (elisp)Mode Line Data and/or C-h i g (elisp)Properties in Mode.

In general, if the alternative tools use the same CLI options (at least for Emacs' purposes) and produce the same output format as the original tools, there would be no reason why you couldn't swap out one for the other in the elisp code (or, quite likely, set a variable for the location of that original program to instead point to the alternative).

If those things are not true, it may be necessary to support them explicitly in the lisp code.

Everyone can contribute to the documentation to make it better. Consider doing so.

Remember, no one gets paid to maintain or document Emacs, so the quality of the documentation is really pretty remarkable for how good it is.

It can always be made better, though.

I read reddit in Firefox and I make use of https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/edit-with-emacs1/ , but you can also just copy/paste between the markdown editor and emacs.

M-a undefined
M-ā is undefined

which is it?

If it's the latter, it sounds like your Ctrl key is acting like a Compose key of some kind, such that C-a produces ā. That sounds super-weird to me (I wouldn't expect any OS to take over the Ctrl modifier in this way), but it would be happening outside of Emacs and anything is possible.

If it's the former then it seems that the Ctrl key hasn't registered, which would also be a problem which is external to Emacs.

The display-buffer-reuse-mode-window action may be convenient for this use-case.

Many of your modes-of-interest will be derivatives of special-mode so you may (or may not) find that specifying that as a catch-all is particularly useful.