Hmm, I've always found it odd how many people say they use emacs, but not for "quick" tasks. It's not like it takes long to start it up -- on my machine, emacs -f kill-emacs takes 0.12 seconds.

On one of my old machines, development server not my desktop:

  edu@galileo:~$ time emacs -f kill-emacs

  real    0m1.421s
  user    0m0.092s
  sys     0m0.052s

  edu@galileo:~$ time vim --cmd :q

  real    0m0.016s
  user    0m0.008s
  sys     0m0.004s

I have to add that if I run again emacs it loads pretty fast, but the first time it's slooow.

  edu@galileo:~$ time emacs -f kill-emacs

  real    0m0.136s
  user    0m0.068s
  sys     0m0.044s

And you don't even have to start up emacs at all. I keep mine running for months without exiting. You can use tramp mode for editing remote files if needed:

/[user@]machine:localfile