I've converted from emacs to vim, but I'm not sure I gave emacs a "fair shake". Early on I was programming with Windows programs using typical GUI interfaces, although I'd also picked up the appropriate shortcuts of pico, joe, and jed. This made emacs the most comfortable environment for me as I headed into coursework using Linux systems, even though I never used much more than cursor movement, copy/paste, and file saving. At that point, I was pretty sure the vi cheatsheet on the lab wall was some kind of joke, like EDLIN in DOS.
But I later entered a new school with more coursework, and I found the emacs key combinations increasingly uncomfortable. A few of my classmates were using vim and recommended it to me. After several weeks of struggling with vim, I was eventually up to prior levels of productivity, with greater gains in the following months as I picked up more shortcuts.
I feel I perhaps didn't give emacs a fair shake, though, because I never used it as more than a glorified notepad. The feeling I get from the various emacs articles I read online is that you don't see big gains in emacs over, say, vim unless you use a lot of custom elisp... a point I have not yet reached.
But I later entered a new school with more coursework, and I found the emacs key combinations increasingly uncomfortable. A few of my classmates were using vim and recommended it to me. After several weeks of struggling with vim, I was eventually up to prior levels of productivity, with greater gains in the following months as I picked up more shortcuts.
I feel I perhaps didn't give emacs a fair shake, though, because I never used it as more than a glorified notepad. The feeling I get from the various emacs articles I read online is that you don't see big gains in emacs over, say, vim unless you use a lot of custom elisp... a point I have not yet reached.