After years of Visual Studio I forced myself to learn vim and it wasn't so hard. By "learned" I mean crossing a line where my productivity is on par or better than Visual Studio used to be.

Emacs, however, is nowhere as easy. I am trying to repeat my vim experience by forcing myself to use emacs (part of my CL adventure) and I feel like I need a third hand to hold Ctrl or Alt all the time... Even vim-style navigation without arrows calls for constantly pressed Ctrl.

Not trying to start a war, just sharing my experience. After all it was other peoples "vim tales" that inspired me in the first place.