I tend to switch back and forth between Vim and Emacs and am curious. What causes the hate in your relationship with Vim?

Vim is an excellent text editor. But I mostly use it for coding, and that's the problem. Vim is not an IDE. It relies on plugins to deliver a half baked IDE experience. Sometimes these plugins are broken and other times they refuse to play nice with each other. As I sort of need them to get the job done I end up wasting time fixing broken things instead of solving real problems. That's why I'm ready to throw this tool away and move on. I might try Vim again in the future when things are a little bit more stable. Anyhow, thanks for all the fish.

Can Emacs replace eclim (eclipse + vim) as a Java IDE? Are there plugins that can make editing Java in Emacs nicer and more productive?

Lots of people who code with VIM don't use IDE's out of choice though. And Vim has had 20+ years of development, so I don't think it's going to stabilize any more.

I'm fully in the vim camp. I think vim is a way better text editor and non-modal editing is terrible, but vim is must less extensible and vimscript is trash. Emacs + evil would be perfect if it didn't mean having to rewrite all the bindings for all the plugins to be more vim-like.

Install evil-mode and you can use all the vim movement shortcuts you're familiar with.

I've tried using emacs/slime with evil but currently I prefer vim/slimv. Evil just felt a little bit "off" compared to regular vim, or maybe it was the slime integration. Anyhow, I recommend giving slimv a try, there's a nice tutorial here: http://kovisoft.bitbucket.org/tutorial.html

I am a big Vim fan and promote its design for the most part, however with Lisp paredit and redshank covers text object movement, editing, and refactoring entirely so there is no benefit to using Evil-mode there once paredit and redshank is understood.

One downside though it that it will leave users wanting that in all languages, something which is sadly not available elsewhere as fluidly. I find myself thinking,"this is great, but what would really improve this situation is if it was inherently structured so that I could exploit that" in other contexts.

Maybe I should give emacs/slime another try then. I use paredit in vim already, but I guess I could give redshank a go. What I like in vim is shortcuts like "ca(" or "ci(" to change an s-expr or change the contents of an s-expr, or "da(" to delete an s-expr. And of course being able to use vim's other text editing commands and macro recording / replaying, visual mode etc.

Seriously what someone needs to do is write Vim in Lisp to put an end to these dilemmas.

Don't do it. Chants VI VI VI.