If your battery is more important, just stick to Emacs.

What machine are you using ? I have a 2 year old thinkpad, it's still 10h+ in full brightness, vscode, compiling, etc. And it's the screen brightness that consumes the most battery.

It used to do 20h, but the main battery is external and can be replaced so it's a good thing. I would really recommand thinkpads to everyone instead of going for macbooks for example.

VSCode doesn't compete with emacs and vim. VSCode competes with Sublime Text and Atom. Maybe even with WebStorm on the more full-featured end and Notepad++ on the leaner end.

I'm not even sure whether you're trolling. BBEdit provides a tiny subset of the features VSCode offers. VSCode is not a text editor, it's halfway between a text editor and a traditional IDE.