That's one way of seeing it. You'll have to keep in mind, though, that you don't need to learn hundreds of Vim commands to be as productive in writing text as b

That's one way of seeing it. You'll have to keep in mind, though, that you don't need to learn hundreds of Vim commands to be as productive in writing text as before - that's actually rather easy to achieve. So, for me, it doesn't seem like a timesink that much because anything past that point will speed you up. Hacking around in my Emacs config (I'm an Evil user) on the other hand does eat up time. I don't know if it wouldn't be as bad if I wasn't annyed with minor things not working exactly how I want them to, though. Edit: I'd also say that Vim bindings are something where "learning by doing" is the best way to get going, and I'd assume the same applies to Emacs hotkeys. If you want to use them effectively, you'll want to develop muscle memory for the most common actions, so they are a great thing to pick up while you're actually working on stuff.