I've been using emacs with evil for a while and performance is fine when running it in client-server mode. Vim might be faster opening files on my computer, but if I had as many plugins for vim as I have for emacs, it would likely be as slow, and it's client-server mode wasn't as good when I switched.

Besides using !$, alt+. on bash copies the last argument into the line you are typing, which might be better if you want to edit it.