[mcbuilder]

Try Spacemacs out! https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs

The beauty of emacs is that it is extremely customizable. spacemacs features a full fledged vim emulation mode that does a great job of feeling like vim.

As far as lisp development goes, the reason for emacs being a "better" environment is that it is implemented in a flavour of lisp, so you see a lot of great packages (paredit/smartparens, SLIME, to name a few) built with lisp in mind. Plus you will be editing your config file in lisp.

[superskierpat]

Though vim (and neovim) has the same plugins these days. I've been using paredit and it works great.