If you are a programmer, though, and you're going to learn Emacs, learn it along with Emacs Lisp and Elisp development tools.

One definite advantage of doing that is experiencing the "plugin" development environment done right. If you ever scripted Vim, or any other program other than the web browser, you're in for a fun ride. really The "plugins" in Emacs are, surprisingly, full-blown programs. When writing them, you can evaluate any part of the code and see the results immediately. You have access to a source-level debugger and two profilers out of the box. Every function you use is documented, and accessing that documentation is trivial. You can "go to definition" of any variable and function, including primitives written in C (if you compiled Emacs yourself and have the sources on disk). You can modify, extend, or override any function anywhere with advices. The language itself is also interesting: it's multi-paradigm. You can write code in procedural, functional, and OOP styles. The OOP implementation is based on generic functions and multimethods/multiple dispatch - unless you worked with Clojure or Julia, you're unlikely to have encountered that before. The quote/unquote-based macros are powerful, and even if you don't use them, you can benefit from them, for example, by using a library providing pattern-matching/destructuring (like pcase or -let).

And you get all of that just for writing plugins for an editor. Let that sink in. The tooling and language, which, though a bit clunky sometimes, rivals professional IDEs and languages like Kotlin, just for writing extensions. Seeing all of this after trying - and failing - to write a simple Vim plugin with VimL and Lua was a mind-blowing experience.

It's also an advantage - to get back to your question - which explains the massive amount of Elisp programs and plugins out there. Well worth experiencing.

There's a huge amount of tools (package) that enable additional features.

It's easy to interface with other stuff.

I've switched to emacs few years ago for the same reason and spent about a year using it. Although I've switched back to vim afterwards, having spent time with emacs was fun and not a waste of time.

Have a leap of faith, find the advantages of one (or the other) for yourself. If you don't like at any time for any reason just switch back: after all, it all text files you're editing.

So, how I experience them, they aren't exactly competitors in a direct sense.

When I use vim in the terminal, I treat my workflow in a particular way. I use tmux to have windows for multiple projects (usually I run 2 or more microservices in my day to day). I use TUIs like lazygit, and I rely heavily on command line tools to build, compile, and do most of the daily things. I am familiar with those and it's basically like the whole terminal is my IDE in some ways. For note taking and idea management, I use vimwiki within vim.

Using Emacs is different for everyone's specific use cases, but the way I have tried to use it as an IDE for golang, node, and some react. Emacs seems to prefer integrating your workflow INTO emacs rather than just having emacs be a single part of your workflow. (I'm simplifying too much, I think)

Evil mode gives me literally every single vim command I ever have used in my entire life. I am a heavy vim user, but I am not an extreme power user. I use macros, regex, and other simple vim stuff. All of it is perfectly fine in evil mode as I use it. But feature parity isn't a great reason to switch from vim IMO.

-The first thing that really is a huge improvement is org mode to capture anything in the code I am looking at that I don't have time to address. Like capturing a weird piece of code or something that might have a bug state, org capture, make a note of it and I can come right back to it later when I have free time.

- Everyone touts magit. I love magit, BUT if I'm being honest with myself, lazygit is nearly just as good...and if you've been using git commands fine for any amount of time, it's more of a nicety than a MUST have. I don't view magit as "the killer app" that other do, but I admit that I really like it and use it heavily whenever I use emacs.

- Elisp is amazing compared to vimscript. That's pretty much that whole bullet point.

There are more things, but it might depend on your personal workflow and the kind of work you do.

I recommend dipping your toes in using DOOM emacs (or spacemacs, but I didn't like that one as much) and getting a feel for emacs. You might find that you like it, you might find that you prefer your current vim & terminal based workflow better.

I'm somewhere between the worlds. I really keep coming back to emacs because of 1) Org mode 2) Csv mode (Sounds silly, but I do a LOT of csv parsing in my life) 3) elisp hacking & scratch mode.

As a vim user, there's just certain tools emacs provides to which there's no vim equivalent (or the vim implementation is lacking). Like org mode for example: I've yet to come across something outside of the emacs ecosystem that does a good job of replicating org mode. Maybe jupyter notebooks come close in some ways, but AFAIK the org mode experience is fairly unique to emacs.

If you like vim, try Doom Emacs or Spacemacs.

If I were going for pure text editing today I might want something like https://kakoune.org/ whose selection->action pattern seems better than Vim's action->selection pattern.