I did the same experiment and came to the same conclusion. There’s really nothing killer in Emacs that makes it a huge sell over just using vim which is a much better editor unless you just love Emacs lisp. Emacs also has some glaring issues - tramp being a major one. It’s slow and very unreliable.
Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It’s a great editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git etc. Emacs has three versions of every plugin and they’re all usually not as good as the thin vim wrapper around fzf etc. If you’re not editing and need email, mutt is a great email client. Irssi is a great chat client. Emacs is very much an all or nothing computing environment.
I am glad I tried Emacs though, because I did love which-key and ended up adding it to my Vim config. And Emacs is slightly easier to quit?
ADVICE: Try both Emacs and Vim vanilla before you do anything else. Downloading a "distro" is really doing yourself a disservice by not showing you just how much either can do without the chrome. And for the love of RMS DON'T USE VSCODE.
Vim is much more in line with the Unix philosophy. It’s a great editor that can be extended with fzf, ripgrep, lsps, git etc. Emacs has three versions of every plugin and they’re all usually not as good as the thin vim wrapper around fzf etc. If you’re not editing and need email, mutt is a great email client. Irssi is a great chat client. Emacs is very much an all or nothing computing environment.
I am glad I tried Emacs though, because I did love which-key and ended up adding it to my Vim config. And Emacs is slightly easier to quit?
ADVICE: Try both Emacs and Vim vanilla before you do anything else. Downloading a "distro" is really doing yourself a disservice by not showing you just how much either can do without the chrome. And for the love of RMS DON'T USE VSCODE.