My personal experience as someone who started with vim and than switched to emacs: If you intend to do a lot of customization to your editor, or expect IDE-lik

My personal experience as someone who started with vim and than switched to emacs: If you intend to do a lot of customization to your editor, or expect IDE-like features, I feel that emacs is the superior choice. elisp is a OK scripting language. Rather quickly I could read and understand the internals of emacs packages (and of some of the emacs internals itself!), despite having basically no experience with lisp. Self-documentation and explorability is truly incredible. I never really looked into VimL, but my understanding is that it is really not as good. I still prefer vim bindings, so I use evil-mode on my "vanilla" emacs and vim bindings in spacemacs (well, "hybrid" bindings to be exact). So my personal take: - vim for sysadmin, being able to run a fast minimal editor behaving the same on multiple machines - emacs for development, where having a "tailor-made" editor with lot of config/customization is important