I've used vim (vi and some other vi colones before that) for over 25 years, and switched mostly to emacs (with evil) about 6 years ago or so.<p>One of the main reasons I switched was because I fell in love with Scheme (and Lisp before that), and loved the idea of an editor that was fully integrated with Lisp, was scripted in Lisp, was mostly even written in Lisp, and had powerful Lisp-editing modes like Slime. It is possible to script vim through Scheme, but 99% of vim's scripts are written in vimscript, and that's really what the vim ecosystem is designed around. So emacs was a clear winner here.<p>I also liked the idea of having email, web browsing, RSS news reading, IRC, Usenet, the shell, and more fully integrated in to the editor. Ideally, every app would be integrated in to my editor, and I'd love to command them all from within there. This is more or less what emacs promised.<p>org-mode was another big draw. It seemed cool, and I wanted to find out if it was really as big a deal as everyone said. It is. All my note-taking is now in org, and I intend to move my browser bookmarks to it too. I've since tried various org-mode clones in vim, and they're not nearly as good.<p>Finally, what really won me over was evil-mode, which allowed me to keep my decades of vim muscle memory and preference for modal editing.<p>I spent several months, spending 10 hours a day to customize emacs the way I liked it, and to bring it mostly up to parity with my vim config (which was thousands and thousands of lines long), along with customizing some emacs extensions that had no vim equivalent (like emacs-w3m, which is an embedded web browser, which is still super handy despite not working with javascript). It took that long despite me knowing Common Lisp and Scheme before switching to emacs, which made learning Elisp a breeze compared to the extra effort it would take someone coming from vim who didn't know any Lisp.<p>And still, even after all that work, I haven't gotten around to learning and customizing many of the things I really want to use emacs for, like email, IRC, RSS, Slime, and the various other extensions made for editing Lisp and Scheme.<p>So I found the switch to be a ton of work, which was worth it for me, since I'm still using emacs instead of vim, and don't intend to switch back. But others who are considering a switch from vim to emacs should also be prepared to do a lot of work customizing emacs to your liking. It's a never-ending process, really, just as it is with vim.<p>Even though I've switched to emacs as my primary editor, I still use both. Each have their strengths and weaknesses, and I still love vim (which comes in handy in certain situations where emacs just isn't cutting it for me).