If you do a task daily, and you can shave one second off it, you save 30 minutes in 5 years. So as long as you spend less than that developing whatever tool or technique making it more efficient, you end up saving more time than you spent optimizing.
I love this and am glad to see it again after all these years. Other considerations, in addition to time, might be 1) whether the project taught you something new, and 2) if there is some mental or physical health benefit to automating the task
Emacs is a text editor at its core, just like vim. The difference is that emacs is extendable. You can write, or install, custom packages for it to make it do damn near anything you ever want, far, far above and beyond just text processing.
Vim is simple and unobtrusive, it has a job and it performs that job and nothing else. It is the purest essence of a text editor. Emacs is an all purpose tool that can be tweaked and changed based on your current or future needs. They appeal to different types of nerds.
