I really, really want to use Emacs. I like the ideas, I like the addons, I like the lispiness. What I can't get over, though, is the pinky contortions and multiple chords required to accomplish things in the editor itself.

I'm not a big fan of vimscript, and the addons seem more clunky, but being able to hit a single key, rather than a chord, or series of chords, to accomplish the basic text manipulations, makes it really hard for me to stop using vim and use emacs for more than a few days.

I'm surprised no one else has said it, but just remap your Caps lock to Ctrl. You can then use your pinky or ring finger, as you prefer.

The Kinesis contour keyboard moves the modifier keys to under your thumbs. Makes a huge difference for Emacs. It makes for a significant amount of retraining, though, too, and vim might still be for you.

I can understand! I actually also use vim a whole lot, which is absolutely wonderful as well. For the pinky/chords thing in emacs, I've be able to adapt by actually using other fingers quite a bit (shifting my hand so I can hold control with my ring or even pointer); and I really don't use multichord combos that much, usually using longer sequences instead (e.g. for indent-region, I hit Esc, then type C-\ rather than typing Alt-Ctrl-\ .) Fortunately this has worked well for me and my hands over time.

> I've be able to adapt by actually using other fingers quite a bit

I actually use the part of my palm directly underneath my pinky to hit the Ctrl key. It works quite well on a ThinkPad keyboard (for my hand shape/size, anyway).

Try viper and/or vimpulse. It doesn't get you all the way to vim, but it gets most of the important stuff.

Or vim-mode. Or ErgoEmacs.

You can avoid somewhat of that with some considered keymappings.

For instance, I remap Control to Alt a ton in emacs. It's very easy for me to thumb-key instead of pinky-key. YMMV, depending on keyboard and hand-size.

As a vim user, I very much lament the fact that there's no good way to run an interactive shell or REPL in vim. The screen hack, Conque, the vim-shell patch, etc., don't match Emacs' REPL functionality.

Seconded. Even after years of using Emacs, I still have to stop for a moment every now and then and think: holy shit, what a motherflippin' piece of software!

...and I get really happy :-)