Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Emacs experience on Windows could be faster, but having switched from Neovim to Emacs on macOS I do not want to go back to Neovim now (and I was running the Neovim 0.5/dev branch with LSP and treesitter integration for some time). Your time might be better spent on improving Emacs performance on Windows if you can. I haven’t used Emacs on Windows for a little while, but I wonder if running it via WSL2 with the ne…
But neovim is only getting started. In a few years, the benefits of elisp over lua will probably be nil, and luajit is faster. I expect a lot of these points you make (which are valid) to become less and less relevant. First examples are already there : treesitter is as clean as can be, and telescope looks extremely nice. I'm waiting to see what people come up with for git, now that they don't have to learn vimscript…
I agree with you that Emacs and Neovim are at different levels of maturity. And I agree that Neovim could eventually gain better docs, more mature and stable packages, more consistent UI conventions, a better Lua dev experience, less experimental and more actively developed GUIs for those who need something more flexible or accessible than a terminal-drawn UI, better filter-pickers, better documentation for LSP integrations, better git integration, better GitHub/GitLab/forge integration, better plugin dependency handling, a better governance story, a healthier bus factor and contribution story, and more thought about the impact of a fork on the Vim community as a whole.
What I disagree with is the idea that “Neovim will be just as good or better than Emacs in a few years and all your current qualms will mean nothing then” is a compelling reason to use Neovim over Emacs today. My list above is a lot of work, and that’s just to reach parity with Emacs, which will also be maturing and improving in that time. To exceed Emacs for me Neovim would need to do all of that and more, or all of that but better and faster.
I don’t doubt that Neovim will get better really fast because the velocity so far is strong. But right now Neovim feels like a scrappy collection of hacks and experiments from a community of enthusiastic prospectors and beta testers who collectively seem to have no common opinion about what they’re even hoping to build (some still feel that Neovim should not become an IDE or that as much functionality as possible should be shelled out to CLI dependencies).
It’s exciting to be part of a bleeding edge editor community if you’re happy to write or contribute to plugins and try out and configure a bunch of existing ones every few months. It’s less great if you want stable IDE-like features now that feel like they were designed with taste and consistency and have been maintained with love for years.
I don’t really have a horse in the race except that I spent a _lot_ of time configuring and building things for Neovim while using it as a daily driver that I now wish had been spent on Emacs instead. I’m also excited that we have such strong communities of Neovim and Emacs hackers today that both are fun to hack on, get work done with, and continue to argue about with strangers on the internet.