@ Chris Wellons:

Yeah, both editors seem to come out of the same sort of conceptual framework, though they diverged based on individual design choices. Vim was designed with the modal editing in mind aiming to minimize cursor movement over slow network connections, whereas Emacs was designed for aliens with 16 fingers on each hand ;) (I kid, I kid).

Oh, and you can totally open blank buffers in Vim. The :new command creates a split with a blank buffer and the :enew opens a blank buffer in the current window. There is also :tabnew which does that for tabs. Granted, vim will assume you meant to save these at some point and will complain if you try to quit without doing so.

I think the scratch.vim plugin implements the Emacs style scratch buffers.

Interesting. As you described Vim buffers, Emacs buffers work exactly the same way. We also occasionally have newbies showing up asking how to get tabs in Emacs, and all this information needs to be communicated in order to dissuade them. Another important feature (to me) of buffers is that buffers need not be associated with a file at all — just for use as scratch space. Any given Emacs instance of mine has on average a dozen such buffers open at any time.

You mentioned opening an entire project tree at once. Thanks to the buffer paradigm, I do this all the time! :-)