I used vim for about 5 years. I decided to give emacs a roll about a year ago. The first few weeks were hard, the next few were interesting, and the rest was just fun.

I suppose it's because I've always been a tinkerer and I love the fact that the wall between editing with emacs and editing emacs is so small.

Anyways, this is all old news. Everybody already knows the arguments for both sides and they're both true. I still use vim when the job fits (configs or quick edits) and I use largely emacs for my development (even if though I work at a vim shop and everybody gives me dirty looks).

Emacs > TextMate > Vim, so only indirectly what you asked.

With Emacs, I got the feeling that it's the kind of environment where time cultivates appreciation moreso than TM or Vim. I gave Emacs about 1.5 months, and stopped because I didn't want to learn elisp and because I was getting pinky syndrome (I think that's the accepted term).

The switch to TextMate was laughably trivial, and I would have switched out far earlier if it wasn't for some of the slightly more advanced bundles. Interestingly enough, while I learned the snippet system, I found myself using them very sparingly.

My Vim switch was cold turkey, and was reasonably straightforward. I've been seriously typing at a keyboard for a long, long time, but Vim taught me that I didn't know a keyboard as well as I thought. In the beginning, the Vim commands weren't as easy to get to (even if I knew them) as typing prose--I guess typing familiar words just become part of muscle memory. It's been several months now, and I'm both happy with the switch and fairly proficient in Vim.

Gun to my head, I'd take Vim over emacs, but only marginally so. It probably has to do with the fact that I didn't begin to customize my emacs environment. I don't know if that's what I wanted though--I love that I just take my .vimrc (it's quite short), drop it on my server, and the only thing that's different is the fact that my theme is different to what MacVim offers me. It just isn't that easy with emacs--at least, not as easy as carrying around a .vimrc on my thumbdrive and dropping it where I need.

Definitely not as easy with Emacs. You have to carry a .emacs around on a thumbdrive and drop it where you need.

I'm in the process of switching from vim to emacs right now. It's frustrating, although viper-mode takes a lot of the pain away, and to be honest I find it a really nice combination to have the vi editing modality readily available within the powerful framework of emacs. Remapping caps lock to Control has helped enormously.

The most notable thing is that emacs encourages you to live in it much more than vim. With vim, I would navigate around in the shell, open up a file in vim, edit, close, repeat. With emacs I'm finding that I spend more time just switching buffers instead of running back to the shell because emacs doesn't simply quit when I kill all my open files. There's always more buffers, so the app stays open and I tend to remain there.

I'm still in the process of getting up to speed with basic editing things, although I've found that the way it manages buffers and what it calls windows (what the rest of the world calls frames these days) is quite easy and quick to use, and I found myself able to navigate around in emacs fairly quickly. All in all, I'm not 100% sure I'll stick with it, but I'm happy so far and I know that I'm still getting over the hump to where I'll be truly productive with it.

If you are anything like me, that is, someone who loves the speed and "feel" of vim, but also enjoys the buffers of emacs. You might want to check out vile (vi like emacs). [http://invisible-island.net/vile/]

>With vim, I would navigate around in the shell, open up a file in vim, edit, close, repeat.

I do that to. I open up an `eshell`, navigate around. Then I edit a file with `vi filename.py`. That works best if you have `alias vi find-file $1` in your eshell aliases.

I've converted from emacs to vim, but I'm not sure I gave emacs a "fair shake". Early on I was programming with Windows programs using typical GUI interfaces, although I'd also picked up the appropriate shortcuts of pico, joe, and jed. This made emacs the most comfortable environment for me as I headed into coursework using Linux systems, even though I never used much more than cursor movement, copy/paste, and file saving. At that point, I was pretty sure the vi cheatsheet on the lab wall was some kind of joke, like EDLIN in DOS.

But I later entered a new school with more coursework, and I found the emacs key combinations increasingly uncomfortable. A few of my classmates were using vim and recommended it to me. After several weeks of struggling with vim, I was eventually up to prior levels of productivity, with greater gains in the following months as I picked up more shortcuts.

I feel I perhaps didn't give emacs a fair shake, though, because I never used it as more than a glorified notepad. The feeling I get from the various emacs articles I read online is that you don't see big gains in emacs over, say, vim unless you use a lot of custom elisp... a point I have not yet reached.

Vim for five-ish years, then Emacs for two, so far.

I just wrote this a few days back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230990

I was the one asking the parent question (something about a comparison between Vim and Emacs). I have, since then, spent at least 20 or so hours struggling with Emacs...

And although I wasn't sure at first, I'm pretty sure it's worth it. Though many of the things in Emacs are nowhere near perfect (like the in-buffer terminal, blech!), it feels like something that can go much farther than Vim in terms of I'm-going-to-turn-my-text-editor-into-a-full-fledged-IDE type stuff. I still don't know if I'm going to stay with it, but I've promised to myself that I'll use nothing else to edit text for a month. When that's done, I'll decide, though I suspect by then I won't want to switch.

I didn't like the shell either, until I realized that it's still an editable buffer.

For example, you can take the output of a command, transform the text directly using standard editing commands, fix the weird one-off cases manually, and then pass the results back to the command prompt. Or save the results to a file. Or interleave with code. (etc)

Turning the entire shell into a fully editable/scriptable/keyboard-macro-able scratchpad is a beautiful thing.

You may find the shell in plan9 really interesting, incidentally.

You're right, that is interesting--yet another reason to get Xen up and running...

The terminal seems most useful to me when copying its output to other buffers. It's not all that special as a terminal program, but it's already inside Emacs, y'know? (I like C-z bound to switch to shell and C-z in the shell to switch back.)

Also, since it's only been mentioned once or twice in this thread: Try re-mapping CapsLock to left control.[1] Ctrl is used quite a bit in Emacs, and often held down while navigating (loosely comparable to toggling modes via Escape in vi). You could also use right-ctrl with the side of your hand when using keys on the left side. People complain about "Emacs Pinky" from bending it down to Ctrl all the time over the years), so if it feels awkward you may want to move Ctrl.

[1]: http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/MovingTheCtrlKey

I haven't given Emacs a fair shake yet, but it's definitely in my to-do list. Maybe with Viper to mitigate the shock...