Yes, but there are a number of people that have gone though periods of using one and then the other. I have, at least anecdotal, experience with both. I worked

Yes, but there are a number of people that have gone though periods of using one and then the other. I have, at least anecdotal, experience with both. I worked on the first release of AIX for IBM. Their lawyers took a couple of years to get comfortable with the Emacs license so I switched to using vi for two or three years. (At one point I had to demo a Lisp system running on AIX at at AAAI conference and I could barely work the built in emacs-based editor.) Eventually, I was able to switch back to Emacs on AIX. My own preference is Emacs for it's breadth of features and its customizations, but I still miss the feeling of speed that I had while navigating source code with Vi or Vim. I still toy with Vim every so often, but I've forgotten so much that I just plod along. Spacemacs is currently on my system, but I usually prefer my own set of customizations and just stick with Emacs and its ordinary bindings. Nevertheless, Spacemacs is an work of genius. I'd encourage everyone to learn basic vi (say what's taught in the tutorial), it's everywhere. After that, IMHO, either of these ancient editors is wonderful and worth adopting. Someday I'm hoping that a new Emacs will be developed built along the lines of Neovim. Digging into the internals of a big Emacs package is pretty painful for me when all I am doing is trying to fix some aspect of my editing experience (see https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/). I'd like a more modern extension language than elisp. While I'm dreaming, someone please rewrite LaTeX to use a real programming language instead of its Turing complete macro language.