[silentbicycle]

While the extensibility of Emacs could be ported to vi, it isn't fitting with the culture/design. The best summary I've heard is that vi is an editor, Emacs is an environment. (I prefer vi as an editor, but use Emacs. Go figure.)

pabbrev rocks! The fact that you can just add that sort of functionality to Emacs is telling.

[nimms]

yeah, I think a lot of the frustration with the emacs editing experience comes down to its standard keybindings. While on a level they do make sense, there's far too much cruft and history in them. Having to type multiple keystrokes to do things like save files, switch buffers, split windows etc is pretty poor in this day and age. I used to use vimpulse until I discovered ergo-emacs. It provides a really good set of alt keybindings for the most common emacs commands. Makes using emacs so much nicer