Considering the popularity of Evil Mode, Vim emulation for Emacs, the idea of Vim conceding to Emacs is like the notion that the parasitic Alien in the movie of the same name conceded to Sigourney Weaver's shipmates.
I used vim for a few years before switching to emacs. I don't think there is a definite reason, just multiple of small ones:
- Vim script is ... very awkward to use, to say the least.
- For any reason I'm not sure of, Emacs plugins seem to be more well developed and refined than Vim's. Mind you, there are still land mines that blow up once every blue moon in any plugin, but things like Emacs live certainly was pleasant to start with.
- I started learning Lisp family languages, and Slime/Nrepl etc. wasn't as advanced in Vim. Now that I'm thinking of it, it seems like Emacs plugins for any language tend to have more focused on live coding.
Still, I think Vim keybinding and default editing functionality is better, and apparently that seems to be a common enough sentiment for Evil mode.
For me it has always been vimscript vs (emacs) lisp. I like to be able customize and not be restricted by a somewhat cryptic and inaccessible language. With evil mode you get a perfect compromise (depending on what you use such a text editor for).
Sure, if all you want is to edit some text files, vim is better.
But that's nowhere near what most people use text editors for. If you're writing code, not just editing text files, there's so much more a good editor needs. For that emacs has significant advantages, and I'm saying that as primarily a vim user. REPL integration in vim is a huge pain, plugins only running in the main thread is a huge pain, vimscript is just a horrible language... There really is no comparison in terms of plugin support, and you need plugins if you want the real features.
They're really smoothing out the edges. I could see myself advocating for this the next time we're shopping but I'd like to see an option to set a limit on response time.
Vi(m) users, when did you concede to emacs and why?