Some more advice for someone trying to learn vim or emacs... RTFM! ;-) O'Reilly has good intro books on both of them that you can work through in a weekend.

Some more advice for someone trying to learn vim or emacs... RTFM! ;-) O'Reilly has good intro books on both of them that you can work through in a weekend. Yes, I know it seems silly to have to read a book to use a text editor, but working through the book and doing the exercises the same way you would for a programming language or API makes the learning curve much, much easier.