[dasil003]

Personally I found vim easier to memorize than emacs commands and that's one of the reasons I went with it. If you work in vim day in and day out for a year (with a little curiosity and exploration) you should have most of this cheat sheet committed to muscle memory and move on to formulating more complex macros and using more advanced vim plugins to their potential.

I agree that emacs is more elegant in its implementation, but then again I think the very foundation of building an editor in lisp creates a level of elegance that is almost impossible to reach by any other path. In other words, vim is less elegant, but I don't think it's bad.

Fundamentally I see vim/emacs as unequaled peers. Vim is optimized for raw text editing potential, and emacs is optimized for customizability. Vim is still richly extensible, and emacs is still powerful for raw editing out of the box, but they lose out to each other on their respective strengths. I think the vim expert will be more effective editing disparate files on vanilla systems, and the emacs user will be more effective customizing his environment for his particular workflows.