First, at the risk of pissing off fellow emacs-ers -- if you're already a regular Vim user, why not stick to it? It's a great editor, and I know a lot of people

First, at the risk of pissing off fellow emacs-ers -- if you're already a regular Vim user, why not stick to it? It's a great editor, and I know a lot of people who use it and are just as productive as I am with emacs. Plus, if anyone ever needs to use their computer, you won't get weird looks when you tell them Caps Lock is Control on your keyboard... Anyway, if you absolutely want to learn something else, I'd suggest going the other way 'round, really: start with something minimal and work your way up from there. For the first 1-2 years, I think, I've used Emacs as little more than a glorified Notepad clone (in fact, I even used it with cua-mode). I think my .emacs file was barely ten lines long. I was transitioning to Emacs from nedit, an old-ish Unix editor with a Motif UI that was getting increasingly difficult to digest and kept crashing and had trouble with Unicode and man I'm old... anyway, all I really needed it to do was let me write text and paint it in pretty colors sometimes. I then sort of picked up its features one by one, as I needed them. The keybindings came first, because it was weird the arrow keys for motion and the other keys for everything else. Then I got a larger monitor and I could fit more than two windows on it and I installed window-mode so that I could switch between windows with M-1, M-2 and so on. (Please remember this was 2005 or 2006 or something, a 21" CRT was a big deal for me...) That's pretty much how I picked up everything else: first big C project was how I picked up xrefactory, then xcscope. First time I had to do big merges was how I picked up ediff, and so on. The best thing about having something as scriptable and customizable as emacs is being able to make it work exactly the way you want it. Making it work exactly the way someone else wants it sort of defeats the purpose, I mean, any editor already works the way someone else wants it. Edit: ah, yes, to address some of your pain points: - Remote editing: look into something called tramp-mode. It's not perfect, and I, for one, use it sparingly, but it may fit your use case. - Weird key combinations: I'm not sure what to say other than "you get used to them". It may be worth looking into how i3 deals with this stuff, too. I no longer use a tiling WM, but when I used ratpoison, it fit near Emacs pretty well -- I bound C-t to Ratpoison's prefix key, and just didn't use C-t for anything in Emacs. But then again, Ratpoison (and its successort, scrotwm) were both written by Emacs enthusiasts, and used similar key sequences. If you're curious about anything else, ask away :-)