In what way is Emacs inefficient for humans?

My guess would be the Emacs pinky:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs#Emacs_pinky

As a novice Vim user who has at times wanted to try out Emacs, this has always been an irritation. I think it's telling that one of the suggested work-arounds according that article is:

> Emacs' built-in "Viper-mode" that allows use of the vi key layout for basic text editing and the Emacs scheme for more advanced features.

Try this task for an example: underline an arbitrary line of text with '=' characters. In vim that's 11 keypresses across 3 operations, possibly less if there's a shortcut I haven't thought of. How many keypresses does emacs take out of the box?

Emacs, especially with paredit, is fairly well optimised for editing s-expressions and the like. Vim is very well optimised for line-based editing, but I don't get on with its buffer management at all.

    > underline an arbitrary line of text with '=' characters. In vim that's 11 keypresses across 3 operations

Sounds like a vimgolf challenge to me. Here's my entry:

YpVr=

I'm wondering now that the creativity to come up with those things might actually be beneficial to coding.

I'd agree with that, and also - an intense dislike of unnecessary repetition / work is definitely a good thing. I'm not sure using Vim causes that, but it definitely reinforces it.

For those that are interested, I would recommend "Practical Vim", and it includes many examples (including the above one) which really accelerate the learning process:

http://pragprog.com/book/dnvim/practical-vim

There are definitely cheaper alternatives (including free ones), but this book really laid the concepts out very clearly for me.

Well, that Vr= soundly beats my :s/./=/g.