I apologise in advance if this sounds dismissive, but: I've tried to use both Vim and Emacs and Neovim and Spacemacs, and every time my pain point is that they're designed for use on the command line rather than as an environment I can switch in and out of. I know this isn't strictly true as both editors can be run as separate applications that you don't quit for weeks, but their roots have persisted into how they're expected to be used.

Take my first foray into vi, at its most basic level. I'm at a shell prompt, where I can use vi to edit multiple files, saving each one when I'm done with it and occasionally switching to another window to run something else, coming back when I need to edit more. But there's nothing storing my list of open files or buffers and where they are on my screen, my position in each file isn't saved; it's like vi expected me to spawn a new instance every five minutes.

When I tried emacs, which allows much more functionality inside the editor -- connecting to servers, databases, or hosting shells or debuggers -- it just made the problem worse. If I started a shell inside emacs before stopping the emacs process entirely, that shell won't be there when I get back and my files won't either. If I want to have a specific file on the right-hand side of my screen, emacs will forget where I put it. If I open a file in a new window, that file will be gone. If I want to have a file stand out by changing its background colour to a subtly-different hue, that will have changed back by the time I need to re-open my editor.

I don't like this idea; I don't want my editing environment to be some ephemeral process that's created when I start and gets destroyed when I'm finished. And while Vim has sessions and Emacs probably has three forms of saved states, they don't quite work: no saved window positions and sizes, no working with files you haven't given a name. I imagine that it's the same feeling you get when you read that something allows Emacs-like functionality: on a checklist, they might both have tick marks on each row, but when you try to use it, it doesn't work how you expect. I think that Emacs and Vim's command-line history have made its users used to this behaviour, spawning all sorts of tools to make configuring your environment easier instead of just trying to save the changes as they happen. I've seen plugins like CtrlP or projectile that enforce the idea that your environment shouldn't last, you can just set it up again each time. And that means you don't bother personalising your environment and putting things where you want them to be, because it's all going to be irretrievably gone if your computer crashes, so don't get attached. Alright, rant over.