[philh]

I had the exact same experience, and agree with everything you said.

I'll note that I tried vimpulse for a while. Then I stopped. I wish I could be more helpful, but that's all I remember. I don't even know if stopping was an actual decision that I made, or if I just didn't start again after reinstalling everything.

(vimpulse-mode is an attempt to bring vim keybindings to emacs.)

[tsm]

I tried using viper, and eventually just got confused and realized that I should just learn emacs...and the best way of learning emacs was to go cold turkey. Some things emulated vi, not vim (delete key would not remove a newline, pressing undo twice resulted in undo->redo (and no net change)). Some things were intercepted by emacs (C-v to try to enter visual block mode). It was just a confusing and unhappy time.

[sb]

seconded! I made the same beginner's error, too, and then decided that it was just the wrong thing to do. Emacs does not have a modal concept and cursor movement is not done with "hjkl" (and "ew") in Emacs. As Steve Yegge said, you should use incremental search forwards and backwards instead. I guess that eliminates many of vim's keystrokes (stats would be interesting), so staying with its keybindings might be prohibitive to learning Emacs...