"emacs is a decent operating system, lacking only a good editor" viper/vimpulse solves this quite neatly. I find the mix of emacs with viper+vimpulse to be the

"emacs is a decent operating system, lacking only a good editor" viper/vimpulse solves this quite neatly. I find the mix of emacs with viper+vimpulse to be the best of both worlds: The efficiency of vim when doing fine-grained text manipulation and navigation, and the completeness of emacs for integrating my workflow (running shell processes, switching buffers and finding files with the built-in fuzzy matching ido-mode). It's just so much better to have the terminal in a split window, interchangeable with code buffers, than having to alt-tab all the time. Emacs brings vi to the whole workflow, in my experience. All the little things, like selecting and yanking text to and from shell buffers (all with vim keybindings), just make it feel good. Also, the indentation is great, keyboard macros are much better (you can record commands other than simple keystrokes, e.g. searching) and the language modes just seem to understand their subject languages more "deeply" somehow. vim and emacs + viper/vimpulse are both programming environments that implement vi's modular editing philosophy. It's the vi editing model that I couldn't possibly leave behind me, not vim. I might even be able to survive a modern "IDE" were I able to use well-implemented vi/vim keybindings :)