Part of the foundation of understanding and appreciating text editors is understanding and appreciating the value of text, rather than trying to abstract it away under an IDE's several layers of GUI controls, widgets, and platform-specific APIs often designed by a single company that's trying to convince you to lock the future of your career and/or company to its platform.

Furthermore, neither emacs nor vim are hard to learn. There's a widespread myth perpetuated both by novices and elitists that it's an all or nothing kind of thing. The reality is that even in vim you can use arrow keys and mouse/trackpad scrolling and ignore hjkl if you want. You could, for example, use terminal vim every single day and use only about 5.5 vim-specific commands: i, ctrl-c, :w, :q / :q!, and ZZ. With gvim or macvim, you could reduce that to two: i and ctrl-c.

Learning vim is like learning Kung Fu, you practice the same awkward route motions until they're so natural that you don't even notice you're doing them. Sadly, it's not a quick process, but it's worth it.

It's true. It made me develop an automatic reflex to hit the Esc key every time after inserting a couple of characters, even when I wasn't using vi at all. It was pretty annoying. Imagine typing a document in Word and pressing Esc constantly. Fortunately I switched to Emacs and the reflex went away.

But don't you find yourself hitting C-a to go to the beginning of a line and then insert a line break, then inadvertently deleting everything on the page. As an Emacs user, I do this all the time.

One nice thing about OSX is that some emacs movements work in most programs.

C-a, C-e, C-n, C-p, C-k, C-y (kill yank not quite the same)

Edit: C-f and C-b too

Edit 2: Just checked and word is not one of these programs :(

Here's a link to add Emacs keybindings to Word on Mac OS X. Hopefully it's still accurate.

http://emacsblog.org/2007/02/18/emacs-key-bindings-in-ms-wor...

It's faster than you'd think. I was far better with Vim than Textmate within a month of my switch.