Emacs or vim?

Neither.

Vscode on a machine with 4gb ram bcuz i like to torture myself and develop efficent software goddamnit

As a punishment tool for our sins or what?

Micro if I want to keep my sanity

Personally I'd go with emacs, been using it for years now and its been great to use, you learn it over time and things just improve and you can do even more things much smoother than without emacs. It is also very alive and you can tune anything to just your liking with emacs lisp and the settings

Your mom, If I may

Vim. I don't like to waste time reading the name of my editing software.

Neovim

Vs code with either’s keyboards