I’ve also tend to feel like an external observer.

I really like these sort of games that try to be as minimal as possible, while still being whole games.

Completely true, i can’t use it without evil mode (vim keybinds)

Emacs. I’ve created a niceish workflow with it. I really like how it’s so easy to change anything. There are also loads of incredibly useful plugins, so that’s cool.

It’s not exactly what you are looking for, but you could check emacs-ng. It tries to replace some of emacs’ internals with rust and expand the possible scripting lenguajes that can be used with it.