"If you want to use emacs as if it was vim why change?" -- to get all that juicy goodness that is the emacs environment, that's why. Emacs is far from perfect

"If you want to use emacs as if it was vim why change?" -- to get all that juicy goodness that is the emacs environment, that's why. Emacs is far from perfect, but there are a lot of things to like about it -- especially if you want to interface with Lisp or Lisp-like environments (Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, etc). Emacs does a better job of interacting asynchronously with other processes -- which is one of the reasons it is better for use with Lisp-like environments. I've used vim for over 15 years, and I still use it daily, but I prefer the emacs/evil environment for anything where I want to interact with a repl from inside my text editor.