Ha! Emacs is a dream compared to vi. I used to poke fun at this guy I worked with years back who was a vi wizard with my impression of a vi guru:
"Hey! Check out this slick vi feature for inserting auto-expanded code blocks using regex pattern matches! First us all five fingers on your left hand, three on your right and bash the spacebar with your nose..."
Thank GOD for progress.
The most powerful aspect of Emacs is that it includes a Lisp interpreter, which Emacs gurus heavily use to customize their environment. Key bindings are not so difficult to learn, really. Once you have used them 1.000.000 times, they come quite naturally :-).
--
David (remembering fondly one of his first love: a Symbolics 3650, with an Emacs implementation of DWIM (Do What I Mean), an editor able to guess (sometimes even correctly) the result intended when bogus input was provided). See how I like parentheses? :-)
XEmacs on Windows has keyboard bindings for the arrow keys, etc that work a lot like 'normal' windows programs. That makes it a lot more tolerable for folks used to Microsoft style text editing. However, ctrl-key navigation has the benefit of keeping your fingers over the home row, where they do most of their work anyway. It's an efficiency thing.
Emacs also has excellent keyboard macro facilities that are worth their weight in gold. The only thing that got me off of Emacs and into Visual Studio are all the wonderful Intellisense features. Those are a huge win...
Learn it once, use it everywhere.
(Which is a good thing considering the learning curve...)
Some of our contractors favor VI Like Emacs. The aptly acronymed VILE.
I've never been able to figure out why he likes it either. Heretic.
:wq!
lets try to remember emacs was around way before keyboard had 104+ keys (not counting embedded music control and msn launcher)
They had to get around the missing keys, (page up,down etc.) which are still non-standard in most termcap on unixes.
And sometime you won't even get the arrow keys...
After that whether you're an escape key lover or meta combo freak is really up to you.
I for one do not find visual studio's keyboard shortcut any simpler. ctrl-k + ctrl-d anyone ?
Why ctrl-v to paste? x to cut? we're just so used to those we think of them as standard when they really aren't.
Emacs keybindings are pretty universal through the UNIX world. While it may seem esoteric, there are good historical reasons for it (as was said by an earlier commenter), and the relative standardization of those keybindings makes it far less masochistic than one might think.
The real mindjob is switching back and forth between Windows programs and UNIX programs. I occaisionally find myself accidentally printing a document when I meant to go up to the previous line.
I learned emacs for the first time in 1985. I didn't feel as if it was difficult to learn, which I suspect says something about me :-) I stopped using it daily in 1992. I just (a few days ago) started using it again, and was surprised to see how little I'd forgotten. I have never figured out vi, despite years of trying to learn it. I now just bind the editor in my shell to emacs.