Matthew Weber is a Vim guy. He really loves Vim and finds it the ideal editor for him. Still, he’s not dogmatic about it and acknowledges its shortcomings. He’s tried Emacs several times and could never make it stick but, again, he’s not dogmatic about it.
Although I somehow missed it, Sacha pointed me at one of Weber’s recent videos in which he gives five reasons to use Emacs and one reason not to. It’s a fair summary and although some Emacsers and some Vimmers will argue with some of his points, the presentation is balanced with plenty for each side to agree and disagree with.
I agree with all his reasons to use Emacs although I wouldn’t call them the best reasons to do so. I also agree that there are reasons not to use Emacs but not the one Weber gives. That reason boils down to Emacs has more “stuff” in it than you’ll use and even though you have to enable it, it’s still there and that’s bad for some reason. It’s bad even if one of those unused capabilities turns out to be just what you need as your workflow evolves.
Although Weber doesn’t make the point explicitly, he believes, as do I, that the choice between Emacs and Vim depends on what you want. If you’re looking for a fast, powerful editor and don’t care about having it do other chores for you, Vim is the best choice. If you’re looking for a computing environment that can perform a myriad of chores in a unified way and, by the way, also has an excellent editor, then Emacs is for you. As I often say, Emacs is for the type of person who really wants a Lisp machine even if they don’t know it or even if they don’t know or care about Lisp.
Regardless, it’s an interesting video and worth a few minutes of your time. The run time is just shy of 16 minutes so plan accordingly.