I've known many world-class programmers who use Emacs, among them Kalman Reti and Steve Summit.
Most of the diehard Vim users I encountered were kind of in the DUVASWUV camp (DHH Uses Vim And So We Use Vim), i.e., they came to it as part of the whole Rails memeplex. That said, vi(m) and Emacs used to share the throne as the canonical Unix wizard editors because they were nearly ubiquitously available, consistent in UI across the decades, and they rewarded proficiency (each in their own way). It was a reliable assumption that a halfway decent programmer in the open-source tradition would be quite familiar with one or the other, if not both.
Being a Rubyist and using vim is definitely a thing. Looks like I was off about DHH being the origin. It certainly wasn't Matz, he uses (and contributed to) Emacs.
Most of the diehard Vim users I encountered were kind of in the DUVASWUV camp (DHH Uses Vim And So We Use Vim), i.e., they came to it as part of the whole Rails memeplex. That said, vi(m) and Emacs used to share the throne as the canonical Unix wizard editors because they were nearly ubiquitously available, consistent in UI across the decades, and they rewarded proficiency (each in their own way). It was a reliable assumption that a halfway decent programmer in the open-source tradition would be quite familiar with one or the other, if not both.