| Take my answer with a grain of salt because I have much more experience with vim and I have used emacs only off and on for a couple years, and I only use it as an "IDE" of sorts. So, how I experience them, they aren't exactly competitors in a direct sense. When I use vim in the terminal, I treat my workflow in a particular way. I use tmux to have windows for multiple projects (usually I run 2 or more microservices in my day to day). I use TUIs like lazygit, and I rely heavily on command line tools to build, compile, and do most of the daily things. I am familiar with those and it's basically like the whole terminal is my IDE in some ways. For note taking and idea management, I use vimwiki within vim. Using Emacs is different for everyone's specific use cases, but the way I have tried to use it as an IDE for golang, node, and some react. Emacs seems to prefer integrating your workflow INTO emacs rather than just having emacs be a single part of your workflow. (I'm simplifying too much, I think) Evil mode gives me literally every single vim command I ever have used in my entire life. I am a heavy vim user, but I am not an extreme power user. I use macros, regex, and other simple vim stuff. All of it is perfectly fine in evil mode as I use it. But feature parity isn't a great reason to switch from vim IMO. -The first thing that really is a huge improvement is org mode to capture anything in the code I am looking at that I don't have time to address. Like capturing a weird piece of code or something that might have a bug state, org capture, make a note of it and I can come right back to it later when I have free time. - Everyone touts magit. I love magit, BUT if I'm being honest with myself, lazygit is nearly just as good...and if you've been using git commands fine for any amount of time, it's more of a nicety than a MUST have. I don't view magit as "the killer app" that other do, but I admit that I really like it and use it heavily whenever I use emacs. - Elisp is amazing compared to vimscript. That's pretty much that whole bullet point. There are more things, but it might depend on your personal workflow and the kind of work you do. I recommend dipping your toes in using DOOM emacs (or spacemacs, but I didn't like that one as much) and getting a feel for emacs. You might find that you like it, you might find that you prefer your current vim & terminal based workflow better. I'm somewhere between the worlds. I really keep coming back to emacs because of
1) Org mode
2) Csv mode (Sounds silly, but I do a LOT of csv parsing in my life)
3) elisp hacking & scratch mode. |