It is similar in its out-of-this-world feeling but vastly different in what it aims to cover. Both feel like impressive tools from different timelines.

Vim is a text editor heavily focussed on efficient modal movement and text editing. This gives it some weird keys to press but it’s very efficient in manipulating text. NeoVim seems more extensible than Vim but I have no experience with it.

Emacs is more like “a system for augmenting the human intellect”. It is a Lisp interpreter which allows you to change the system to your needs. Emacs often predates other tools and so default keybindings and naming are often good but weird. It treats most of what it supports as text so it feels like a text editor from a distance but aside from coding and writing prose, you can use it as a mail client (mu4e, gnus, notmuch), to browse the web as text (eww), as a second brain (org-roam, denote), to play Tetris, as a chat client (erc, ement.el), it can even be a window manager (exwm) and much more. It’s like a suite of applications, maybe?

Vim users gradually try to get Vim keybindings into all of their applications for fast text editing. Emacs users try to pull everything into Emacs so they have a fully programmable and consistent environment for all their work. A cozy space. Although the debate never cleared on preferred keybindings of Emacs vs Vim, evil mode does bring Vim keybindings into Emacs. Both have a steep learning curve and last you a lifetime.