Over at the Emacs subreddit, floofcode asks those who moved from Vim to Emacs to tell their stories. On the one hand, it’s pretty much what you’d expect. The majority of the commenters said it was either Org mode or Magit (or both) that convinced them to move.
The second most popular response was that Evil mode—with or without Doom or Spacemacs—was the selling point. Those users felt that they got all the familiar benefits of Vim along with the power of Emacs.
For me, the most interesting responses where from those users who said that they found Emacs to be faster and easier to use than Vim. That’s a bit of a surprise. It’s received wisdom that Vim is faster and easier to use than Emacs, yet these users found just the opposite.
Oddly, none of these answers apply to me. I migrated from Vim to Emacs before the time of Org mode or Magit. And, although I was a long time Vi/Vim user, I didn’t embrace Evil mode but jumped right into the conventional Emacs milieu.
So what was the attraction? At this point, I don’t really remember. I think it was about the time I started using Lisp and Scheme seriously so it seemed like the Lisp based Emacs was a natural choice. As I’ve written before, I’d made tentative attempts to move to Emacs before but one silly thing or another always stopped me. Suddenly, the universe and I were ready and I moved to Emacs without looking back.