then don't. use whatever you're productive in, not what some silly weblog entry says you should.

Emacs and Vim have ridiculous learning curves. Their practitioners wouldn't be so fanatic about them if anyone could unlock their powers in a day. However if you're ready to make a real commitment to learning it, you might get a great return on investment down the line. Learning about all the great programmers who favorite those editors might give you enough faith to give it a serious try.

disclaimer - Im a daily vim user.

I think the {derivative of the} learning curve has a long tail.. I keep finding new cool things I can do with it, I guess emacs is the same, or even more so as you can start hacking lisp...

I recommend printing out a cheat sheet with the most common commands - you can start small and get work done.

Things like <esc> :E for browsing files is handy and youll forget them at first. I map a hotkey for :bn :bp so I can flick through the open buffers.

Good tuts on the web. It packs a punch.

oh, on ubuntu youll need to install vim-full

  sudo apt-get install vim-full

.. thats annoying, but you'll be crippled without it.

I wouldn't say Vim has a ridiculous learning curve, it took me about 5 minutes to read through vimtutor and get started with vim.

However, being a vim adept for a long time hasn't stopped me from switching to textmate when it came to developing rails apps. ;)