[todd8]

Thanks for pointing out Textadept. I'm going to take a look at it. Lua seems almost ideal as an extension language, and it would be a more familiar language than Emacs Lisp for most programmers. I want to look at what Textadept does about Unicode; Lua doesn't yet support it very well (although there are libraries for using Unicode).

It would still be beneficial to learn Vim or Emacs. The scale and breadth of add-ons for these environments is staggering. This makes getting started seem difficult, but one can simply focus on learning the basics (which are all that are offered by most competing editors). There are good tutorials for both Vim and Emacs built into the editors. It will only take an hour or so to go through one and learn the keys and commands for straightforward editing.

Another way to get started would be to start with a stripped down emacs. Although I use GNU Emacs, there are simpler implementations. I like mg. Its a micro-emacs that supports most of Emacs's common commands, but has no extensibility. It's definitely not a toy, and might provide a nice stepping stone to full GNU Emacs. It runs in a terminal, starts up instantly, and has a small footprint. On a Mac, I install it with homebrew. Microemacs is the editor reported to be used by Linus Torvalds.