Sublime sounds like exactly what you want. I use the mouse all the time, especially when I'm doing a lot of reading and navigating. For these tasks the mouse is

Sublime sounds like exactly what you want. I use the mouse all the time, especially when I'm doing a lot of reading and navigating. For these tasks the mouse is actually substantially faster. But when I already have my hands on the keyboard I can use vim commands to do quick navigation instead of moving my hand to the mouse. I think mouse based interfaces are much better for reading code, which is a lot of what I spend my time doing, and Emacs and Vim don't support that very well. People may think their ace-jump and fancy motions are faster than the mouse, and they may be faster than the overhead of moving your hand to the mouse, plus the clicking, but when your hand is already on the mouse, the mouse is so much faster. One great thing about Sublime's vim emulation is it is better about interacting with mouse use than other vim-things, including vim itself. I also find Sublime is great at not taking "mental energy" like you mention. Multiple cursors can do basically the same thing as vim macros, but with macros I have to think hard about whether my commands will generalize and exactly what I want to record, but in Sublime I can see immediately if things are working (yes Vintageous works with many cursors). Similarly the infrequently used commands take much less memorizing. I can do weird finds like "find in all .rb files in project, whole words, case insensitive" and then immediately convert my command to a replace without retyping all the other conditions or using an entirely separate command. In Emacs I'd have to Google how to do this since I do this kind of thing infrequently. For tying to shell there are Sublime Text plugins that could do that, and writing your own would be easy. Personally I use one that allows me to run my selections through a Ruby script, or even evaluate my selection as Ruby. Example: I wanted to sum a comma separated list of arguments, so I select the first comma, spam "cmd+d" to select the rest I wanted (but not the whole file), type "+", select in parentheses, then replace the selection with the ruby evaluation. It was super quick.