For new users selecting one I think this comes down what you're looking for from the application and the plugins/community around them. But, I really don't think there's any killer differences between them, it's just a matter of taste.

For you:

> I came to Emacs because of Lisp (and general FP audience is much, much, more based around Emacs, > makes sense), amazing tools and plugins which I found more stable, better designed, and it is weird > to say this but things just worked with Emacs, things like auto-completion

I recognise it's more popular to edit Lisp with Emacs, but Vim seems to do just fine. I play with Clojure and do that using Vim perfectly fine there are great plugins (fireplace etc). There's no doubt that the 'emacs is code' thing attracts Lispers to it.

Both, Emacs and Vim both have large ecosystems of tools and plugins around them so I consider that a non-issue.

In terms of configuration, I think Vim is easier to get started with. I personally consider Emacs system a steep learning curve for the general use-case. I find Vim is very well documented and has lots of settings for all the conceivable things you'd want, plus a raft of plugins to alter it's behaviour in the ways I want. However, the fact that Emacs can be rewritten in-itself is a powerful concept so in principle you can't see an advantage there.

In the past people used to say that Vim was smaller and that was a reason to use it over Emacs, but that's a total non-issue for the general use case.

I don't think it really matters which one you choose, as long as you spend some time getting to know 'it' properly.

LOL, I felt the same way about emacs when I tried to force myself to use it. Interesting that you point out that "the scripting is awful" - my sense after a year of using emacs full time was that the _only_ way to use emacs is to learn to script/reprogram it. If you don't mind my asking - how _did_ you learn emacs? Were you a lisp programmer to start with? Or did you learn it in the context of emacs?

Some lisp experience (especially CL) can help with learning elisp, but it's entirely possible to do so without it.

The process of learning emacs is roughly this:

-Launch emacs

-Run through the tutorial

-Learn the shortcuts and gain gradual proficiency in the editor (this step can optionally come later)

-Find something you want, or that annoys you (I wanted to have Solarized Dark as my theme)

-Google how to fix it, introducing you to .emacsrc and .emacs.d

-Copy snippets into your .emacsrc (or .emacs.d/init.el)

-Gradually learn elisp as you customize your emacsrc and snippets to your needs.

-Start writing your own snippets, with the help of the excellent documentation.

-Begin writing about how great emacs is online (I am here)

-Eventually start writing full-fledged emacs packages.

-Master the intricacies and horrors of elisp. Begin to despise the language. Comfort yourself by saying, "at least it isn't vimscript."

-Start supporting xemacs in your emacs config and packages. At this point, your config is a large hierarchy of directories. If it wasn't, it is now. If you didn't hate writing elisp already, you will now.

-Under the pressure of the demands of your users, spend more time working on emacs packages and other improvements to emacs than your actual work.

-Snap, and spend the rest of your days improving emacs and writing tributes to RMS.

Most do not follow this learning curve to its conclusion.

The only thing that sort of scared me off of customizing emacs is that if I, say, SSH into a remote box or go to another co-workers computer, my customizations won't be there. That's why I do my best to stick with "out of the box" vim defaults (and vi defaults if possible): I know they'll always be there, wherever vi is.

However, there are some ways to combat this.

Firstly, you can keep your .emacs.d on github, and pull it down to whatever machine you're working on. Indeed, this is what many emacs users advocate.

Secondly, many emacs users will ask: Why are you launching emacs over SSH at all? Instead, use TRAMP or SSHFS, bring up the folders under dired if you need to see the folders, and edit the files with your local emacs.

You can become compotent in emacs without customizing it, but the customization is a big part of why emacs is great.

Although emacs is no more suitable for FP than vi really, other than having better support for some of the functional languages, and for Scheme and CL (which aren't functional, but are often associated with FP, and are sometimes written in that style.

I'd go so far as to say that if you _don't_ feel comfortable using vi "out of the box", you probably should steer toward something else - vi is just not customizable like other editors/IDEs are.

Modal editing is far superior, once you learn it.

Emacs runtime and configurability thanks to Elisp is far superior to VimL.

So just use Spacemacs. ^^

Also, installing plugins requires one to create one's own layer? Eww.

But it does a lot of work for you.

I started to create my own setup from scratch with Evil etc.

But recreating all that Spacemacs has, especially with customizing all the plugins for Vim keybindings, is countless hours of work.

You can skip the layers and side-install custom plugins quite easily though.

For me the "feels wrong" is that vim is always just a little bit snappier than emacs. If you gave me a borderless window with no branding and only let me type vi commands I bet I could tell vim from emacs 9/10 times.

I used emacs exclusively for > 20 years and just recently began to transition to vim to save my tendons. It's amazing that so many of the verb-noun command constructs are still wired in to my brain stem.

I use emacs with evil, my approach for this is to use vim keybindings for everything related to text editing and emacs keybindings for everything else.(With just some minor exceptions).

Unless you want to go the whole full exotic keyboards route and/or go crazy with remaps, emacs keys are just too painful.

You won't feel anything now, but 3-5 years down the road you might start to feel the strain.

    :%!awk '<do some awk stuff>'