While Evil mode is good, it is not true vim. That could be one particularly strong reason. There is also performance, emacs is slower than vim, unless you set up an emacs daemon at startup.
Can you verbalize what significant thing you're missing from Evil that's present in vim?
As a vim user of 25 years before switching to Emacs+Evil, I can name only about two things.[1][2] And they're not nearly enough for me to go back to vim for.
[1] - vim's \zs regex pattern, which would let me position the cursor ahead of where the regex match would normally take me without it. This can be very useful for certain macros, but I don't encounter an absolute need for it very often.. but when I do, I wish this was possible in Emacs.
[2] - In my experience, vim has been much more performant on large files with long lines.. but, again, I don't edit such files often enough to make me want to back to vim... and, anyway, when relatively rare cases when I do need it I can fire up vim for that one use.
Doom emacs is really fast on booting! And you have to open it only once, rest of work you do through emacsclient. I like how fast doom emacs is that sometimes I do unthinkable - I close emacs - just to restart it again.
I'm in the process of converting to emacs after about 6 years of vim - I find just having a daemon launch at startup and always having a frame open is fine once you get into the mindset of sending whatever you're editing to that frame instead of just editing it in the session you're in. I actually kind of prefer it now because when I used vim I never really took advantage of multiple buffers. I'd just open, edit and close.
One thing that's eluded me howver is being able to have graphical and terminal emacs work with the same daemon.
You, sir, have made my day. Doom in the terminal makes life worth living. I've been using vim for several years and am loathe to leave the terminal so this is useful. Very.
daemon only helps with startup, it does not solve the runtime-bootlenecks. Though, there are settings to minimize those, and other soltions in progrewss which might hit emacs-master in some years.
As a vim user of 25 years before switching to Emacs+Evil, I can name only about two things.[1][2] And they're not nearly enough for me to go back to vim for.
[1] - vim's \zs regex pattern, which would let me position the cursor ahead of where the regex match would normally take me without it. This can be very useful for certain macros, but I don't encounter an absolute need for it very often.. but when I do, I wish this was possible in Emacs.
[2] - In my experience, vim has been much more performant on large files with long lines.. but, again, I don't edit such files often enough to make me want to back to vim... and, anyway, when relatively rare cases when I do need it I can fire up vim for that one use.