Comment by iLemming

Missing the point - it's not about "attacking/defending" - Emacs and Vim just can't be compared categorically, the core of their design is about two dissimilar, unrelated concepts. Vim's augmentation of modality is absolutely brilliant, beautiful model, enormously practical idea. Emacs rooted in another incredible, powerful idea - practical symbolic notation for lambda calculus. Comparing them plainly from their "text editor" aspect is wrong - it creates wrong perception of they are about.

It's almost invariably about the trade-offs, without knowing what they are and how to navigate them would remain a highly debatable topic.

You have fixated on a single (albeit voluminous) aspect of things to make a choice. But there are dozens of other things we can drop there and steer away from Emacs with wrong conclusions, e.g. Emacs has mail client capabilities, and for anyone unfamiliar with Lisp, it might be obvious - more specialized email apps would look far more capable. But for an experienced Lisper, no specialized app would ever suffice. Particularly because Lisp allows them to adapt things with extreme precision, specifically for their use cases.

> The big reason I switched

You have switched (as it seems) without even understanding what it was about. It's not about Org, Magit, or any other "features" of Emacs. The main idea is and always was the Lisp interpreter. For someone like me (staunch Lisper) Magit is not some "packaged", ready-to-use piece of software, it's a set of libraries I can use. I can easily incorporate just about any Magit function into my workflow directly. I don't have to submit patches, I don't have to ask anyone's permission, I don't have to guess - the source code is given, I don't even have to save my experiments anywhere - I can just start typing Elisp code in my scratch buffer and eval things in place. Similarly - I use Org-mode for a bunch of things that may sound absolutely unrelated - I consume HN, Reddit, Jira, GitHub, Slack and other content in org-mode derived buffers. Why? Again, because of bunch of APIs, functions and commands that Org provides. I can for example easily retrieve any HN thread and extract all the URLs people posted in comments, and inspect each in-place - takes me a keystroke. Or I can send the text to an LLM - without ever copying and pasting, without context switching, without losing focus. No other [popular] piece of software ever granted me such enormous power and liberation.

I am absolutely so grateful to my younger self for forcing me to grok Emacs and Lisp, and I will never understand the sentiment and the "reasoning" of people moving away from it (after being exposed to its absolute supremacy over plain text). Realistically, there's never switching away from Emacs for me, that, unless a better Lisp engine emerges at some point. And btw. I am a die-hard Vimmer. I use vim motions everywhere - system wide. They permeate my editors/IDEs, web browsers, terminals, and yes, even Emacs. And I use Neovim as well - it works well when I need to reach for it - like I said: it's not a comparison.