I'm in this camp.

My first, very brief, foray into Emacs was at the suggestion of a friend back in, oh, '91-92. He raved about the buffers and the shell windows. Well, I couldn't run my 4GL programs in the shell windows, since they were full screen programs, and the terminal emulation wasn't working. So, I just stopped and went back to what I was doing.

This turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For this what the heart of the UNIX explosion. Everybody and their mother had some new box running some sort of UNIX, and we were installing software on all of them. While I spent my day in SCO on 486/66 (Shared by 8 other people), we were installing on Suns, IBM, NCRs, DG, Sequent, HP, and probably something else. I was always on someone else machine.

vi, of course, was everywhere. Not so much Emacs. I was also working in their environments, not mine, so box stock was the norm. And at the time, vi was more than suitable and capable. I still use vi pretty much the same way. Today I have multiple windows, unlike back then, but beyond that those formative years were so ingrained, those patterns and habits stick to this day. vi doesn't need plugins, it has bang-pipe. My file systems (notably tmp) are littered with x.x, y.y, z.z, etc. files adding as ad hoc cut and paste buffers. If I couldn't do the work with bang-pipe, shell out, bonk on some data in /tmp/x.x, pop back into vi and :r /tmp/x.x. Is it a single keystroke? No. But it's not in vi either. yyp is about as short as you can get.

Later, as I moved into Java and Python, I started adopting Emacs. I was particularly attracted to its auto formatting support for Java. Later on I chose Ant (Java build tool) because is had a -emacs switch to make the output compatible with emacs so I could jump to compiler errors. But that's stock behavior in emacs, we get that "for free", Ant conformed to emacs, vs the other way around.

I still kept my vi habits in emacs. If I wanted to refactor something, I was more apt to do something like vi `find . -name "*.java" | xargs grep methodToRename` than use emacs. I had multiple windows, so this was simple to do. Since Java is strictly typed, it coped well with yelling at my ham fisted endeavors when I went stomping through the code base.

I finally moved to an IDE, NetBeans, around NB 5 or so. Auto complete spoiled me.

Today my use of Emacs is mostly only for Lisp, and even then my Nerd Cred isn't up to par. I don't use Slime. I use emacs for lisp almost solely for auto indent, and paren matching. vi's lisp indent isn't spectacular, but emacs' is pretty good. The paren matching is about par, it doesn't bother me to use % in vi to test parens, but emacs is better. Then, I just ^S, and reload the file in my REPL.

I've tried Slime, but simply I don't do enough Lisp to make it worthwhile. It doesn't stick, so I have to relearn it when I come back. Just not worth the bother. I just want to work and get stuff done, not fight tools. Emacs on the Mac works well enough out of the box for me. Scroll wheel scrolls, Cmd-XCV cuts/copies/pastes, I can mouse around and double click things. You know, text editor. I also like messing with elisp in the scratch buffer. Even an old guy like me can remember ^J.

Basically what I've learned in my computing career, having to jump around every place, there's one commonality that's at every location I visit. Me. Rather than relying on adapted environments, I rely on an adaptable me. I like tools, I use tools, but I pick tools that work well out of the box. I want a tool, not a kit. Unix, thankfully, comes with a base set that I learned a long time ago. The important ones (important to me) have stuck with me. I can awk all day long, but I can't even spell 'perl', and it's my go to shotgun if I need it.