I'm more in the vim camp, but I will say emacs has one of the best GUIs out there. Everything that works in the terminal still works (great keyboard accessibility), plus you get additional benefits, like proper window separation that isn't just a text character drawing an imaginary line (so copying lines of text with the mouse when you have a bunch of splits is easier). There's also image support, you can connect to a server with TRAMP, open up dired, and view remote images right in emacs. I always thought that was cool.
Vim on the other hand never felt like it benefited much from a GUI, or like it had a very good one available. I just use neovim in a terminal.
I expect the vast majority of Emacs users to use the GUI rather than the TUI. In fact, the way I learned Emacs was by clicking on 'Help' in the menu bar and then on 'Emacs Tutorial'.
Granted, the UI is still TUI, so items like panes, tabs, nerdtree, quickfix, :help windows etc are rendered with characters, but you can drag borders, mouse-select text, click files, focus panes by clicking, scroll-wheel, etc.
Being able to choose is a good thing. Use what works for you. I prefer the terminal, but not as hard core as switching to a TTY and never see a GUI again...
> Being able to choose is a good thing. Use what works for you.
If you look at many of the ‘user stories’ in this thread (and others), you see a lot of people using vi/vim not because they decided to try it, but because they had no real choice. Very often it’s the only usable option on a Unix-like machine.
And yet, you don’t see many people bemoaning the choice. Despite being forced to use it, once people are over the fabled learning curve they tend to like it.
Vim on the other hand never felt like it benefited much from a GUI, or like it had a very good one available. I just use neovim in a terminal.