Use tramp with Emacs and you can interact with remote machines as if they were local. Who cares if the server only has vim, you have Emacs.
+1 for Tramp. You can connect to SMB, ssh, and even docker containers from within Emacs. It's strictly better than using a remote ssh session with vim because you don't need to configure anything server-side. It would be a huge hassle to setup plugins like autocompletion on a remote machine for vim, but Emacs lets you use all your regular plugins while ssh'ing, which is a huge bonus.
Vim can also edit remote files, with its built-in netrw module. It can do ssh, ftp, dav, fetch, http, rcp, rsync.
vim scp://[email protected]//absolute/path/to/document
:help netrw-start
But will every other Vim plugin (like fuzzy-finding file browsers or whatnot) work with netrw-accessed files as if they were local? Does it trivially do multi-hop SSH through e.g. bastion machines?
I have yet to see something as powerful as tramp for this.
I agree, and I use both Vim and Emacs regularly. Both great tools with different payoffs.
They're especially awesome together: http://spacemacs.org/
If you want "personalized powerhouse editor with IDE powers" you are FAR better off going with Emacs/Evil.
The Emacs plugin ecosystem is way ahead of Vim.
Plugins are clean, stable and compose well together. That was never my experience with Vim.
Also unlike Vimscript, Elisp is pretty clean useable language that many Emacs users actually learn. I'd bet the vast majority of vim users never get past step 1 on learning Vimscript?
Emacs/Evil for the workstation and clean Vim for the random server side work.