[adiM]

> I made a few abortive switches to Vim that didn't last a week because my productivity was too hampered and the environment too extreme & foreign.

I started vim by using cream[1], which behaves like a normal editor with menus to configure everything. Once you get used to the different concepts, you can start editing the `.creamrc` file. After a few years, I was comfortable enough to drop cream completely and use hand written vimrc file for the configuration that I liked.

[1]: http://cream.sourceforge.net/