After years of distro-hopping, I settled with NixOS 7 years ago and kept on expanding my setup to accommodate for my new demands from it. I might be hopping to GNU Guix at some point in the future because of their choice to use scheme as the configuration language for the Guix setups.

I also feared them prior to using and writing my own config. But later, I found out they have packages that highlight different parentheses depth with different colours (rainbow-delimiter), auto insert missing parens (parinfer) and whatnot. This makes the process of working with them a lot easier!

Since people fear parentheses, GNU Guix.

I guess it is time to start setting up Nyxt.

Only if simplex-chat had better UI...

What you are describing for the master-sleve layout can be achieved with either, XMonad.Layout.Grid or Tall layout (more likely, other ways to achieve this).

The stack layout on the other hand can be achieved through the XMonad.Layout.Accordion? And if you are not a fan of that you could always refer to the XMonad.Layout.Tabbed.

Extra:

• mirror functionality where you can rotate your layouts. Mirroring XMonad.Layout.Tabbed results in a stack-like layout.
• magnifying glass for your layouts and much more!
• Not a fan of a specific layout and want to adjust it a bit? XMonad.Layout.LayoutModifier is your friend!
• XMonad.Actions.WindowBringer to bring window into focus on demand.
• XMonad.Layout.ToggleLayouts toggle desired layout on specified binding.

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!