Everything you said jives with me, with the exception of emacs. I know it's a religious topic to some, but I have to ask... do you regularly see servers without vi, but with emacs installed?
After I posted my previous response I realized that I actually know a few emacs keybindings thanks to tmux, even though I've never used the editor. I use a lightly modified vim on my laptop, but I think it's best to learn enough of the defaults (of any application/utility) to speed up your workflow on a new host.