Well, the "editor wars" are silly. You should use whatever you prefer. That said, I started using Emacs a few months ago, and can explain what I like about it.

Well, the "editor wars" are silly. You should use whatever you prefer. That said, I started using Emacs a few months ago, and can explain what I like about it. Emacs is not really "an editor" in the sense that vim is; it is more like a platform for building custom IDEs. It's built from the ground up with customization and exploration in mind. Want to know how some function works? It's very easy to jump to the code where it's implemented and start reading. Have you ever thought "I wish my editor did this or that" ? In emacs you can just write the code to make it do whatever you want. Other editors support plugins, but they're not nearly as seamlessly integrated into the core editor as they are in emacs. Emacs is mostly written in elisp (which is the same language that plugins are written in) so there's basically no difference between plugin code and emacs itself, they are all just running on the same elisp vm in the same namespace.