Regardless of editor X, Y, or Z, this article is about a feature Vim received. I for one find it useful since, well, I use vim.
Given that for decades a primary draw for vi was that it was simple, the fact that people keep adding features to it until it's approaching where Emacs was a few decades ago is noteworthy. Noting that Emacs has had a certain feature for decades, and that the feature has been receiving bug fixes and adding still more sub-features is substantial.
Given that users of vim no longer seem to care about simplicity, one has to wonder: why stick with vim? Emacs has a far better extension language (elisp is to vimscript as a thermonuclear weapon is to a sharp stick), evil-mode can accurately replicate the vim editing experience, and Emacs has far more features and packages now than does vim.
It's a bit like preferring a race car to a van because you want speed, but then deciding you want to haul packages for a living and bolting on a 2-ton flatbed to the back of your race car. You end up wasting fuel and still not carrying as many packages as you could with a good van — and not running as quickly, either.
The first time I fired up emacs was in 1995 on a pentium 66 with 8 MB of RAM. It made my computer grind to a halt so editing text was not going to happen. When I tried vi, it ran like I expected a text editor to run.
So here I am today, my fingers long trained up to use vi, and I find little need to learn emacs. Sure emacs has had useful features for years, but the barrier to entry was just too high, and now it is too late to win over folks like me.
But I'm equally sure that if you made a habit of using e.g. spacemacs, you probably would not need to use it all the time either. But I guess I don't know your workflow. Why do you even use that buffer? I curse every time I accidentally open it.
Besides, as long as hitting the Escape key feels like sending messages in morse code I don't think I'll ever get used to it.
Emacs is the greatest application I’ve ever used, bar none. I’ve tried vim, and it doesn’t even come close.
Trying to adapt Emacs for me coming from Vim feels like recreating Alpine Linux by modifying an Ubuntu installation: it's pointless, cumbersome and feels insane.