"it takes much longer for emacs to start up than vi" This is false on pretty much any modern system. They start up in about the same amount of time. Using lo

"it takes much longer for emacs to start up than vi" This is false on pretty much any modern system. They start up in about the same amount of time. Using lots of packages (in both vim and Emacs) will slow down startup speed, but there are tricks to speed that up too (like by defering actual loading of them until they're needed). Also, most people who run Emacs just keep it running all the time, and almost never quit or restart it, so startup speed would not be an issue even if it was slow, which it isn't. "people use a long-running emacs a lot differently than they use disposable vi's" Emacs has an emacs-client binary which you can use exactly the way you use a disposable vi (or vim). It'll connect to the long-running Emacs process in the background, but that's an implementation detail that you as an Emacs user wouldn't have to worry about, apart from starting Emacs once when you boot your system. Regarding your description of shell-flipping, Emacs does offer shell integration, where that sort of thing can be done, but I personally don't use it and run shells outside of Emacs (and run both my shells and Emacs itself under tmux), so my workflow with Emacs and the shell mirrors the traditional vi/vim workflow. I didn't have to change my decades-old vim muscle memory or workflow when I made the switch to Emacs.