I switched from Vim to Spacemacs (sorry...). I am considering setting up a vanilla emacs w/ Evil soon but I feel like I need to set aside a day or so to do it. Spacemacs does do a lot for you, and the layers system is not without its benefits.

Sorry, this turned into a bit of a thought splurge, but serves as a good overview of why I'm sticking with Emacs for now (after using Vim exclusively/obsessively for years).

Number one benefit of Emacs is Lisp. Hacking on plugins is a lot more pleasant because of it. I don't think I'm alone in my dislike for Vimscript and love of Lisp.

There are many other factors that make it more pleasant than Vim. I like that `M-X` just shows a fuzzy-matched list of elisp functions, I like that I can do (eg):

M-X, find-function, ENTER, [function-name]

and jump to the on-disk definition of that function.

The packaging system (with MELPA) is far more satisfying and modern than my old pathogen + git repo setup for vim. I think this is getting better in vimland too, though.

As far as specifics go:

The best thing for me is autocompletion, I used YouCompleteMe in Vim which (don't know if this is still the case) used to block UI rendering all the time. I remember it being particularly irritating for JS development using Tern, which works great with the relevant Emacs plugins.

CIDER[1] is amazing for Clojure development (this is actually why I switched).

Magit[2] is much more pleasant than Fugitive IMO, though they accomplish much the same thing. For what it's worth I was never really sold on Fugitive (I just use the console...), but I tried briefly. I find myself using Magit more and more (in particular for inline diffing, "Oh what changed here since commit X" sort of stuff).

The old joke that Emacs is 'basically an OS unto itself'. I actually appreciate this. There seems to be more of a culture of developing "apps" for Emacs, things like helm-spotify[3], which are actually pretty fun/useful. I know there are mail clients too, for instance. Being able to open a console in the project dir with `SPC-'` is something I enjoy vs using TMUX.

I think, in general, I prefer Emacs' more ambitious approach when it comes to windows/buffers within the app itself. This is a difference in philosophy.

Projectile[4] is another plugin I very much enjoy using. Don't know if this is personal preference/maybe I never put in the required effort in vim-land, but I never came across anything as satisfying, simple, functional to use.

I have heard nothing but great things about Org mode[5], though I have yet to jump in there. Again I feel like I need to invest a little time into it before it becomes useful. I have appreciated (certainly in the GTK version) that Emacs supports a slightly more rich display than Vim did (Images, bullet points etc). This is just eye candy, though. Also comes with the caveat I never tried GVim, maybe it is also capable of these things somehow.

The single most frustrating thing is my current inability to tame the auto-indent algorithm, as well as TAB's behavior. I don't know if this is Spacemacs specific.

1. https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider-nrepl

2. https://github.com/magit/magit

3. https://github.com/krisajenkins/helm-spotify

4. https://github.com/bbatsov/projectile

5. http://orgmode.org/