It's an interesting two sides of the same coin. Emacs, as lisp legacy, is centric, everything as layers around a lisp core (and C bits). Vi is more island like, complex logic is delegated to external programs most of the time.
It's interesting to compare the two, how to decouple/modularize a system.
most people that cite vi-vs-emacs diatribes these days have never actually even used "real" vi -
vim has just about all the "bloat" of emacs but without the real extensibility/programmability..
and just about any emacs session will likely be an order of magnitude smaller than any ide, while on the topic of bloat.
- someone who uses emacs and vi (but not vim)
ps: BSD is Unix
I decided to try Spacemacs hoping I might find their vim imitation to be 90% of what I was using in vim, such that I could take advantage of the excellent CIDER mode for Clojure development rather than hacking an analogue in vimscript + a user.clj file. I found Spacemacs to cover everything I had been doing in vim, almost universally better out of the box than I had before.
I recently gave spacemacs a try and it’s been my daily editor for the past few months. There is a lot to learn, but spacemacs solves the main pain points I had with off the shelf emacs and I’ve found it to be very productive for me.