[rsayers]

Vim or Emacs, it doesn't really matter. Users of both will tell you that their editor is best, but if one was really better, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion after so many years.

I personally picked emacs for a number of reasons, you seem to already be familiar with Vim so that might be best for you.

Print out the cheat sheets, and get to work. It's terribly frustrating at first, but you'll be off the sheets in no time. After a month of steady emacs use I could not go back to anything else. I have to use Eclipse at work from time to time and I find the experience maddening; having to use keys like Page Up, Page Down, Home, etc. Emacs lets me do all that and more without ever leaving the home row. I'm sure Vim is the same way.

Pick one, learn it, love it... just don't become a zealot :)

[narrator]

Vim used to have an edge when emacs was viewed as "bloated" for using 8 megs of ram, but now that's pretty negligible. On big projects I can get eclipse to use more than 2 gigs!

[silentbicycle]

As a data point, my Emacs session is currently taking 75 mb RAM (on a 64-bit system). It's been up for a few weeks. That seems pretty typical.

While it's common to start and stop vi(m) frequently, Emacs is usually kept running, with shells, interpreters, etc. inside it. The start-up cost of loading lots of extensions amortizes over the total session. (And it just took about seven seconds for a new Emacs to start and load everything I use, FWIW.)