[PaulHoule]

"Vim is tough editor to pick up, especially late in your career. It is notoriously difficult to master."

Bull. I started using emacs when I was 18 and switched to vi at the age of 40.

The reason I switched was the I found many difficulties when I was using emacs on one hand and mouse-based editors on the other. One problem is that you can't easily cut-and-paste out of an emacs window because of the continuation characters. Another one is that if you use emacs and Windows editors, you'll end up confusing ^X^S with ^S and wind up typing the wrong thing into the wrong window.

You can get started with vi if you know the arrow keys, switching in and out of INSERT mode, as well as :wq and :q!. If you're using putty, visual cut-and-paste works great.

Learn how to use / and you're cooking with gas. I keep an old Unicos vi reference card around so I can gradually learn "dd", "G" and other useful keystrokes. But I was productive within 10 minutes of switching to vi.