I read this, spent most of the day struggling with Vim and then went back to Textmate defeated. I still can't understand why I should move to Vim/Emacs when I spend 99.99% of my time infront of a Mac.
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.
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.
