My main focus is on modal navigation, editing and dealing with text as objects - that's the real long-term benefit Vim gives me. For new users selecting one I

My main focus is on modal navigation, editing and dealing with text as objects - that's the real long-term benefit Vim gives me. For new users selecting one I think this comes down what you're looking for from the application and the plugins/community around them. But, I really don't think there's any killer differences between them, it's just a matter of taste. For you: > I came to Emacs because of Lisp (and general FP audience is much, much, more based around Emacs, > makes sense), amazing tools and plugins which I found more stable, better designed, and it is weird > to say this but things just worked with Emacs, things like auto-completion I recognise it's more popular to edit Lisp with Emacs, but Vim seems to do just fine. I play with Clojure and do that using Vim perfectly fine there are great plugins (fireplace etc). There's no doubt that the 'emacs is code' thing attracts Lispers to it. Both, Emacs and Vim both have large ecosystems of tools and plugins around them so I consider that a non-issue. In terms of configuration, I think Vim is easier to get started with. I personally consider Emacs system a steep learning curve for the general use-case. I find Vim is very well documented and has lots of settings for all the conceivable things you'd want, plus a raft of plugins to alter it's behaviour in the ways I want. However, the fact that Emacs can be rewritten in-itself is a powerful concept so in principle you can't see an advantage there. In the past people used to say that Vim was smaller and that was a reason to use it over Emacs, but that's a total non-issue for the general use case. I don't think it really matters which one you choose, as long as you spend some time getting to know 'it' properly.