It's not as big a deal anymore, but people still have the discussion. I know that I got involved in one not long ago. As a Vim guy who went and learned Emacs,

It's not as big a deal anymore, but people still have the discussion. I know that I got involved in one not long ago. As a Vim guy who went and learned Emacs, the best advice I can give you is to try to use vimpulse.el. It's an extension to Viper-Mode and does a really good job of emulating Vim. I never would have gotten used to Emacs without it. It's not slow in my experience but then, maybe you're just more sensitive to that than I am. And no, that would happen with Emacs. Emacs is more of an environment than an editor per-se. You can almost use it as a replacement for bash; certainly as a replacement for screen at any rate.