vim is more of a text editor that emphasizes a minimum of keystrokes to do things efficiently. Emacs is a text editor that is leans more to the IDE side of the spectrum with many cool extensions that make your life easier.(I am not saying vim doesn't have extensions just that emacs seems to use them more or has more of an emphasis to them) Both are excellent text editors. one will fit your style of living. use that one.

Someone said on Stack overflow, "I use Vim for manipulating text, Emacs to do programming and Firefox to look at funny cat pictures". I agree with that assessment.

Vim is on pretty much everything, it starts up quickly, for rapid text editing it's pretty difficult to beat.

Emacs once it's up and running (in emacs server mode at least) is reasonably speedy but much more resource hungry and is an entire operating system.

To put it into perspective, I used org-mode for 6 months and loved it for that alone, but vim just works better for me as a text editor, YMMV.

We were taught basic programming with Emacs, connecting to an HP-UX machine. So we really didn't know much Emacs anyway :-)

It can be better for preventing RSI.

But mostly it comes down to a preference on how to do things.