One of the reasons I've been thinking about vim lately and working on learning it more is that I've been flirting with the idea of switching to using vim for all of my programming in order to focus all of my attention on one editor instead of splitting it across vim and GNU Emacs as I nominally claim to do. The reality is that I already spend most of my editing time in vim, because these days I don't do much programming (especially in the languages I use GNU Emacs for). Given an increasing use of vim and thus increasing fluency in it, and low GNU Emacs use (with a slow loss of fluency), I thought it might make sense to just go all in on vim. Vim has all of the basic features that I need to be productive (like windows on multiple buffers aka files), and it also has its own well developed form of super-intelligence (and plenty of people who like it a lot).

I'll put the conclusion up front: I'm not going to do that. I've decided it makes more sense to stick with GNU Emacs as my super-intelligent editing environment (and maybe get a bit better at it every so often).

What ultimately changed my mind today was the experience of experimenting with GNU Emacs' flycheck (and go-flymake's addon for it). Specifically, that the whole exercise took me only a couple of minutes to get going and everything basically just worked. I'm sure that there's an equivalent plugin setup for vim and an experienced vim person could get it up and running in no time flat, but I'm not that person. For better or worse, GNU Emacs has worked out a whole complex ecology of ELPA and MELPA and then buried all of the complexity so that it pretty much just works for people like me. I'm a lazy and pragmatic person these days (eg), and for all my agonizing and contemplating, I still know enough GNU Emacs to be productive and GNU Emacs makes it easy for me to just get code written in a sophisticated environment with a lot of niceties that generally just work.

(I don't know enough about the world of vim plugins to know if super-intelligent stuff is more likely to appear for GNU Emacs than for vim, and of course my current impressions are biased by the fact that MELPA seems to have this massive list of everything)

This isn't to say that getting code written is hard in vim. With work I could probably assemble a vim environment full of equivalents of magit and company-mode and so on, I like vi's overall approach, and I'm going to reach the point where I'm better at editing in vim than in GNU Emacs. But since both GNU Emacs and vim are quite capable editors and I already have a good GNU Emacs environment that I find easy enough to do things in, it seems unlikely that switching exclusively to vim would make a huge difference, especially given that I don't write code in GNU Emacs all that often (cf Amdahl's Law). Instead it seems more likely that I'd spend a lot of time churning around and wind up more or less in the same spot, except using vim commands instead of GNU Emacs ones. That's not enough of a win to be tempting, not any more.

(To head off the obvious suggestion, for various reasons I'm not interested in trying to use vi keystrokes in GNU Emacs. If I'm going to be using GNU Emacs, I have a lot of experience and reflexes built around its native key bindings.)

There's a part of me that regrets this (the same part that likes the idea of Rust). It would quite like to embark on the grand (and periodically frustrating) adventure of (re)building a sophisticated editing environment in vim, learning all about vim plugins, and so on, and even now it's busy trying to convince me that I'm making a mistake and I'm only going to frustrate myself by continuing to go back and forth between vim and GNU Emacs instead of mastering vim (and finding cool plugins for it). The rest of me has other things to do.

(And I admit that I still like GNU Emacs, and not just because you can put the kitchen sink into it. I've edited a lot of code (and text) in GNU Emacs over the years and in the process I've gotten quite used to it. I didn't drift away from it because I dislike it, I drifted away because it doesn't make for a good sysadmin's editor.)