As anyone who’s been around Irreal for awhile knows, I’m all in on Emacs. I find new uses for it and things I didn’t know it could do every day. Nonetheless, I was a Vim user for a long time and still consider it—along with Emacs—one of the best two editors available. For plain editing, it’s composable command set makes it the fastest editor I know of.
Back when I was a Vim user, and even now, I frequently hear complaints about how hard it is to learn and use. That’s just plain wrong. Modal editing does take getting used to but once you do, many consider it superior to non-modal editing. Just take a look at all the evil and spacemacs fanatics if you doubt that.
Ben Orenstein over at robots.thoughtbot.com has an excellent rant about the putative difficulty of Vim and puts an end to the myth. He directs new users to enter
vimtutor
in their shell and spend 30 minutes on the tutorial. At the end of the 30 minutes you won’t be an expert but you will be proficient. Use it for two weeks, he says, and you’ll be faster than you were with your old editor. Conclusion: it’s not that hard to learn Vim and become an expert user.
It’s certainly easier than Emacs. After a few years of using Vim, I seldom came across anything new (other than new features that Bram introduced) while I can’t seem to go a day without learning something new about Emacs. And, of course, no one can remember all the key sequences for Emacs while it’s pretty easy to learn them all for Vim.
All that said, I prefer Emacs for the reasons I’ve explicated many, many times here but if what you really want is a fast editor that you can master in a reasonable amount of time, Vim is a good bet. Or better yet, have the best of both worlds and check out evil or spacemacs.