Speaking personally, I've been a professional developer for almost decade and even in my relatively short career I've seen a lot of technologies come and go. I was reluctantly roped into it by my first boss, an enthusiastic Vim advocate. And since, almost nothing else (save for maybe git) beat learning vim from a return on investment perspective. From the default mac OS installation to some old Fedora box that has not been patched since the early 2000s, Vim (or its simpler brother Vi) has always been there!

And once I got used to it, I couldn't really imagine using computers any other way. I'd go so far as to say that the 'home row' concept of vim is the ergonomic ideal of keyboard based computing, and I now try to mimic that behavior everywhere -- the vimium extension in chrome, various vim plugins for vs code and sublime etc. If you're on the fence, I'd urge you to give in!

Same here, and then i discovered EVIL, the vi layer for emacs. The best of all worlds: Vim text manipulation grammar over the emacs engine.

I've used Emacs for many years, and recently switched to Spacemacs, a set of configs that kind of takes over Emacs and puts a great platform on top of it.

I frequently describe Spacemacs as a better vim than vim. Don't get me wrong, I've used vim for ages; I'll never stop editing server config with vi, nor will I stop getting mad when vi is actually vi and not vim.

But for a day to day code editor? Spacemacs is astonishingly good.

(Of course, Spacemacs is built on top of EVIL, as well as dozens of other packages. On the shoulders of giants, as we say.)

The problem with Emacs and all its modifications is that it cannot match Vim's flexible system for custom keybindings. And because of that Evil mode has the same limitation, beside its insistence to prefer using builtin Emacs functionality over emulating Vim behaviour correctly.

And the other thing that I could never get used to is that Emacs' terminals can't handle ncurses applications. I usually like to run Vim in a terminal multiplexer and combine it with various terminal utilities when needed, and Emacs doesn't support that - unless you run it in a terminal, but then Evil mode stops working properly...

I'm fine with Vim, but I'm glad I tried Emacs for a while because it does have some nice ideas.

Interesting, my impression was that custom keybindings was more flexible in Emacs + Evil than in Vim. It seemed easier to e.g. define new modes with separate keybindings, and if you use the GUI version, more distinct keybindings are available.

> And the other thing that I could never get used to is that Emacs' terminals can't handle ncurses applications.

It can now. The problem is that there are a lot of shells and terminals available in Emacs, so it's not always obvious which one supports what. But emacs-libvterm [1] is a "real" terminal inside Emacs, and supports ncurses apps well. (The website warns about being alpha level, but I used Emacs + Evil for about half a year, and it worked fine for me.)

[1]: https://github.com/akermu/emacs-libvterm

> I'm fine with Vim, but I'm glad I tried Emacs for a while because it does have some nice ideas.

I ended up with the same conclusion :).