Every time I'm reading about emacs I'm thinking if it might be worth porting my vimrc to emacs+evil. What do you think? Anyone done the switch? Are there any significant benefits I get from doing it?
I made the vim -> emacs+evil switch a few months ago, no spacemacs.
What drew me to it at the time was emacs --daemon and emacsclient, which lets you have the same view of the same files open in different terminals or GUI windows ("frames") and saves you from the "file already open" warnings you would get from vim when e.g. editing a file and browsing ctags in different terminals.
Things I found annoying after the switch:
* lack of tabs (situation may have changed since I switched; there's an evil-tabs package but I haven't used it. By now I just got used to emacs' way of doing buffers and frames)
* I feel like I'm fighting the built-in bindings a lot in cases like e.g. dired-mode (directory browser) and Ibuffer-mode (buffer listing)
Notes which you may find useful if you decide to try it out:
* While emacs will work in a terminal, I've found it more comfortable to use the GUI, because it saves me having to think about why e.g. trying to look up help triggers a backspace (C-h).
* my evil config, for an example of some settings and how to tame bindings: http://pastebin.com/TxxuSU8u. Not just mine, a lot of people post their init.el online, and they're often a good reference.
I switched from emacs to vim a few years ago. I'm happy I did it. I think you need a concrete reason to switch. I also switched to the emacs key bindings. I figure if you are going to use an editor you should use it as intended, but that's personal preference. Plenty of people are happy with evil.
My specific reason was I wanted to be able to run commands asynchronously in a separate buffer, rather than switching back and forth between the editor and a terminal. The other reason is I think vimscript is terrible, and I didn't want to learn it to customize the editor. Elisp is much nicer, and the documentation is fantastic.
I've heard VIM has since gained async buffers, but not lisp.
As for knock on benefits, there is really a fantastic ecosystem of applications built for emacs that I can't imagine are possible for most other editors. This is because emacs is a lisp runtime that happens to include an editor. So it has a built in terminal, email client, irc client, Tramp mode, Org mode, etc.
Diehard Vim user here. I use Vim-motions everywhere, system-wide.
You should at least try Spacemacs, learn the layers system and then based on that build your on configuration. Trust me - it just makes things a lot easier. Spacemacs comes in different "flawors" you can choose bare-bones, instead of default and then add anything you want on top of that.
I switched from Vim to Spacemacs (sorry...). I am considering setting up a vanilla emacs w/ Evil soon but I feel like I need to set aside a day or so to do it. Spacemacs does do a lot for you, and the layers system is not without its benefits.
Sorry, this turned into a bit of a thought splurge, but serves as a good overview of why I'm sticking with Emacs for now (after using Vim exclusively/obsessively for years).
Number one benefit of Emacs is Lisp. Hacking on plugins is a lot more pleasant because of it. I don't think I'm alone in my dislike for Vimscript and love of Lisp.
There are many other factors that make it more pleasant than Vim. I like that `M-X` just shows a fuzzy-matched list of elisp functions, I like that I can do (eg):
M-X, find-function, ENTER, [function-name]
and jump to the on-disk definition of that function.
The packaging system (with MELPA) is far more satisfying and modern than my old pathogen + git repo setup for vim. I think this is getting better in vimland too, though.
As far as specifics go:
The best thing for me is autocompletion, I used YouCompleteMe in Vim which (don't know if this is still the case) used to block UI rendering all the time. I remember it being particularly irritating for JS development using Tern, which works great with the relevant Emacs plugins.
CIDER[1] is amazing for Clojure development (this is actually why I switched).
Magit[2] is much more pleasant than Fugitive IMO, though they accomplish much the same thing. For what it's worth I was never really sold on Fugitive (I just use the console...), but I tried briefly. I find myself using Magit more and more (in particular for inline diffing, "Oh what changed here since commit X" sort of stuff).
The old joke that Emacs is 'basically an OS unto itself'. I actually appreciate this. There seems to be more of a culture of developing "apps" for Emacs, things like helm-spotify[3], which are actually pretty fun/useful. I know there are mail clients too, for instance. Being able to open a console in the project dir with `SPC-'` is something I enjoy vs using TMUX.
I think, in general, I prefer Emacs' more ambitious approach when it comes to windows/buffers within the app itself. This is a difference in philosophy.
Projectile[4] is another plugin I very much enjoy using. Don't know if this is personal preference/maybe I never put in the required effort in vim-land, but I never came across anything as satisfying, simple, functional to use.
I have heard nothing but great things about Org mode[5], though I have yet to jump in there. Again I feel like I need to invest a little time into it before it becomes useful. I have appreciated (certainly in the GTK version) that Emacs supports a slightly more rich display than Vim did (Images, bullet points etc). This is just eye candy, though. Also comes with the caveat I never tried GVim, maybe it is also capable of these things somehow.
The single most frustrating thing is my current inability to tame the auto-indent algorithm, as well as TAB's behavior. I don't know if this is Spacemacs specific.
(Please don't suggest spacemacs)