Precisely that I am neither an Emacs nor Vim expert. I am just an amateur that knows about the two editors with just amount of knowledge. If you check out two of my Emacs and Vim repo, this could be the worst experience of all time. I hold onto an idea that the editors are just a tool. Unless there are issues that hamper or paster my workflow, I will avoid changing the configuration to my editor. Only because I am not going to remake the wheel, indeed, I am not going judge either Emacs over Vim or Vim over Emacs.
Lead to the conclusion; I use Emacs more often than Vim. Before Vim users left the website, I would like to hold onto the basis, why I chose Emacs for my most frequently used text editor. First and foremost, I organized the editor users into two groups. Base on my own experiences, people who use Emacs are most likely work in the software development industry. On the other hand, the majority of Vim users works either in cybersecurity or a free hacker. The reasons are pretty much straightforward, as a software engineer, I would much appreciate Emacs’ design. Emacs’ architecture brings a lot more spaces and flexibilities to the software development workflow, and it maximizes the changing possibilities to the software engineer. Most of the software development is most likely to stay in a program that could likeliest achieve most of the tasks. Does it sound familiar to you? Yes, it is just another way of saying the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Of course, Vim could possibly do what Emacs does, extends to Vim’s original design, I found that conflict Vim is an editor design for fast editing file in terminal. Comparing the two editors, Emacs had been built the way what software developer wants; Vim would most likely lose in this battle on this aspect. Vice versa, Vim are very popular to those who do not need an IDE to do their job and often require to exit text editor to jump to other software, do not even argues that Vim is moving towards to Emacs’ design. Well, this leads to a problem that I could not find a good reason for having the conflict between the original design fast editing file in terminal and having multiple plugins or configurations in Vim. Though, if Vim starts moving towards to Emacs’s design, does that mean Vim will lose the advantage on fast editing file in terminal? Many of Vim users complains Emacs was too big and cost so much of its’ starting time, but now they want more plugins or configurations to their Vim settings? Emacs was designed between the lightweight text editor and heavyweight IDE, resulting Emacs could not going to be faster than Vim on the starting time, but it brings benefits to people who will like a ’lightweight IDE’, it retains most functionalities from any IDE, or even better, program yourself one!
If Emacs is that good why still not many people using it? The reason could be straightforward, I learned Emacs from scratch without any in-between supports like Spacemacs or Doom-emacs. I found that Emacs main website is not that friendly compared to other many sites. Plus, you could barely saw videos online that are about Emacs. Furthermore, compares to Vim’s shortcuts design, Emacs have less cognitive shortcuts consequent people having a hard time learning Emacs’ shortcuts comparing learning Vim’s shortcuts. I would doubt anyone would likely to learn Emacs by having all these kind of challenges or difficulties in front of them. The learning curve is steep, and the cost of learning a new language for editing Emacs’ configuration, which is EmacsLisp, could be an extra cost of time. If you notice programming language Lisp, then maybe this would be too obscure to you. In my case, I have no experience with programming language Lisp which leads me many hassles while learning EmacsLisp. I have been using Emacs for 4 years, and I still could not say that I am an expert to Emacs. I am not trying to, and I reckon developing routine is most likely imperative comparing to fixing the editor’s configuration.
Lastly, I would say these are just my personal experiences; this means all of these are just my subjective thoughts. Some could be right, and some could be wrong. Emacs have its’ own benefits, which Vim also does. I often use Vim editing files while I connect to the remote server. Indeed, one more advantage to Vim is that Vim is pre-installed on the most system. This lead to the conclusion that there is no best editor, the only wise man knows how to use the right tool on the right circumstance.