[nimms]

I think part of the reason that vim and emacs are so powerful but also so hard to learn is that they were created before we had nice homogenous operating environments with a standard 108 key keyboard and Graphical User Interfaces.

They both come from a day when all UI's were text based and so it's not surprising that they offer more powerful editing models than newer alternatives, considering they've both had 30 odd years of refinement.

It's also understandable that people find them more difficult to use. The major advantage that a GUI has over a text interface is that it's more discoverable and given that most people these days have grown up around GUI's, we thus find text based UI's intimidating.

Either way, as developers, most of our day to day tasks revolve around editing text, so I'd say that using a tool that's aimed at giving us maximum textual love is a good thing.