Why limit yourself to only one editor? Learn some emacs basics, learn some vim basics, use both or either as you see fit. Gedit, atom, notepad++, sublime, whatever you are comfortable in will work best for you. Whatever your development cycle best supports is best.

Spacemacs is a nice middle ground and more intuitively usable than either so that is my main editor. Hard to escape emacs when you're working on lisp due to slime. Hard to escape vi when you're setting up new machines.

> To further gauge popularity, I counted 22,582 questions tagged with vim and 15,667 questions tagged with Emacs on Stack Overflow.

well, Emacs has its own Stackexchange site (https://emacs.stackexchange.com/) for a while now, currently with 13,271 questions, that makes 28938 questions together, Emacs wins! ;)

I think the majority of users of each do not debate the relative merits but simply use them for what they are good for. I use Emacs a lot because I use org-mode a lot. if there was a stand alone og-mode application I might be willing to give it a try, if there was a vi based version ditto but I don't spend any effort to debate the merits of them, I just use what works for me for now.

Vi is like C, it just ain't going away because it dominates a niche that it is perfectly suited for. I think emacs will decline as other graphical/simple text editors and IDEs keep making inroads.

to me as long time emacs user, I see the opposite: emacs is not declining but gaining users and developers