I agree that there are some trade-off, but other editors have their trade-offs as well. IMO, Vim's trade-offs are acceptable. Actually, / for search is traditio

I agree that there are some trade-off, but other editors have their trade-offs as well. IMO, Vim's trade-offs are acceptable. Actually, / for search is traditional beyond Unix: Opera and Firefox understand it. And ? (which is Shift + /) searches in the opposite direction (a smart trade-off). x, while not literal, is descriptive: think about drawing an x over a character to "delete" it. hjkl, while not mnemonic, are so often used that that it is advantageous having them there and muscle memory develops fast. Goto line is also <line number>G, more mnemonic. I think the steep learning curve comes from the need to learn a richer and more precise way of editing, while you may be used to get by with a sloppy one. I had a similar experience when I switched to the Dvorak keyboard: I learned for the first time how to touch-type, while the Qwerty grew on me from hunt-and-peck. Since you are considering about going back, here are some useful custom mappings of mine: - swap p and P; - map Space as PageDown; - map Shift + Space as PageUp; The last two mirror the way most document-displaying applications work. Generally, don't think twice about remapping some commands either to correct historical quirks of Vim or make it behave consistently with other applications you may be using, hence lowering your memory load. Have fun