I used vim for about 5 years. I decided to give emacs a roll about a year ago. The first few weeks were hard, the next few were interesting, and the rest was just fun.

I suppose it's because I've always been a tinkerer and I love the fact that the wall between editing with emacs and editing emacs is so small.

Anyways, this is all old news. Everybody already knows the arguments for both sides and they're both true. I still use vim when the job fits (configs or quick edits) and I use largely emacs for my development (even if though I work at a vim shop and everybody gives me dirty looks).

Emacs > TextMate > Vim, so only indirectly what you asked.

With Emacs, I got the feeling that it's the kind of environment where time cultivates appreciation moreso than TM or Vim. I gave Emacs about 1.5 months, and stopped because I didn't want to learn elisp and because I was getting pinky syndrome (I think that's the accepted term).

The switch to TextMate was laughably trivial, and I would have switched out far earlier if it wasn't for some of the slightly more advanced bundles. Interestingly enough, while I learned the snippet system, I found myself using them very sparingly.

My Vim switch was cold turkey, and was reasonably straightforward. I've been seriously typing at a keyboard for a long, long time, but Vim taught me that I didn't know a keyboard as well as I thought. In the beginning, the Vim commands weren't as easy to get to (even if I knew them) as typing prose--I guess typing familiar words just become part of muscle memory. It's been several months now, and I'm both happy with the switch and fairly proficient in Vim.

Gun to my head, I'd take Vim over emacs, but only marginally so. It probably has to do with the fact that I didn't begin to customize my emacs environment. I don't know if that's what I wanted though--I love that I just take my .vimrc (it's quite short), drop it on my server, and the only thing that's different is the fact that my theme is different to what MacVim offers me. It just isn't that easy with emacs--at least, not as easy as carrying around a .vimrc on my thumbdrive and dropping it where I need.

I'm in the process of switching from vim to emacs right now. It's frustrating, although viper-mode takes a lot of the pain away, and to be honest I find it a really nice combination to have the vi editing modality readily available within the powerful framework of emacs. Remapping caps lock to Control has helped enormously.

The most notable thing is that emacs encourages you to live in it much more than vim. With vim, I would navigate around in the shell, open up a file in vim, edit, close, repeat. With emacs I'm finding that I spend more time just switching buffers instead of running back to the shell because emacs doesn't simply quit when I kill all my open files. There's always more buffers, so the app stays open and I tend to remain there.

I'm still in the process of getting up to speed with basic editing things, although I've found that the way it manages buffers and what it calls windows (what the rest of the world calls frames these days) is quite easy and quick to use, and I found myself able to navigate around in emacs fairly quickly. All in all, I'm not 100% sure I'll stick with it, but I'm happy so far and I know that I'm still getting over the hump to where I'll be truly productive with it.

I've converted from emacs to vim, but I'm not sure I gave emacs a "fair shake". Early on I was programming with Windows programs using typical GUI interfaces, although I'd also picked up the appropriate shortcuts of pico, joe, and jed. This made emacs the most comfortable environment for me as I headed into coursework using Linux systems, even though I never used much more than cursor movement, copy/paste, and file saving. At that point, I was pretty sure the vi cheatsheet on the lab wall was some kind of joke, like EDLIN in DOS.

But I later entered a new school with more coursework, and I found the emacs key combinations increasingly uncomfortable. A few of my classmates were using vim and recommended it to me. After several weeks of struggling with vim, I was eventually up to prior levels of productivity, with greater gains in the following months as I picked up more shortcuts.

I feel I perhaps didn't give emacs a fair shake, though, because I never used it as more than a glorified notepad. The feeling I get from the various emacs articles I read online is that you don't see big gains in emacs over, say, vim unless you use a lot of custom elisp... a point I have not yet reached.

Vim for five-ish years, then Emacs for two, so far.

I just wrote this a few days back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230990

I haven't given Emacs a fair shake yet, but it's definitely in my to-do list. Maybe with Viper to mitigate the shock...