Before Vim I had to look for an editor every time I learned a new language. Now I just use Vim. For everything.
On a more serious note: I have a long-term goal to learn either Vim or Emacs for various reasons, the above mentioned being one of them.
It's hard to feel so spectacularly unproductive as I do when I try them out though, so it's easy to give up.
What's there best way to go about learning Vim or Emacs?
Check out this old HN post[1]
What you need is a motivating factor. Vim is almost guaranteed to be there on any Linux/BSD/Mac shell environment, which motivates people in those environments to learn it even if they learn no other editor.
Beyond such environments, like on any desktop GUI, what'd motivate you to try GUI Vim? For Emacs, I can say the integration between any set of tools you can imagine could be a motivation.
The reason Emacs users don't particularly appreciate IDE's is that Emacs' integration of code editor, compiler output, debugger control makes the development cycle extremely fast. Add any 1 more use to that. File explorer? Emacs dired. Process monitor? Emacs proced. Interactive shells? Emacs integrates Unix shell, Python sessions, anything interactive actually.
You will get all your work done in Emacs, just using editor operations! Go to the source code for a compiler error? Hit "Enter" or click on the error in the compile window. Go to the source code being debugged? Stepping in the debugger automatically opens the file at the right line number. Found the bug? The code is already there ready to be fixed; switch to the compile window & compile. Find a file in a directory? Do a text search in its dired window. Rename all files beginning with foo to begin with bar instead? Do a search-replace.
Emacs also scales way better than any desktop editor or Vim, whether it is opening GB-sized log files, or binary files viewed/edited in hexadecimal. Before long, you start managing your to-do's using org-mode, and doing all your Git operations in the insanely featureful Magit interface.
The list gets longer and longer every release. And many Linux shell environments support the same basic keyboard short-cuts (Ctrl-A to go to beginning of line, Ctrl-E to go to the end, Ctrl-R to search in the shell history), and also provide light-weight Emacs clones like 'zile', 'mg' for editing-only use in the terminal.
http://cloudhead.io/2010/04/24/staying-the-hell-out-of-inser...
https://gumroad.com/l/vi_quick/
vi is the predecessor of, and a subset of, vim, and is probably available on even more platforms than vim is. So knowledge of that single editor (vi) enables you to work on any of those platforms. And you can always progress to (and through - it is big) vim later, at your own pace.
I wrote it at the request of two Windows system administrator friends who were given additional charge of some Unix systems. They later told me that it helped them to quickly start using vi to edit text files on Unix.
Sitting at a unix terminal at the university and being forced - you can't install anything - to learn either of both to get anything done. ;)
https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FootSwitches http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_best_keyboard.html http://ergoemacs.org/emacs/emacs_pinky.html
Vim is great, but after 20 years of using it, I'm moving mostly to Jetbrains stack since flying around the code is faster and syntastic (a vim plugin) is slow as shit on large projects. Thankfully the vim bindings in Intellij are pretty darn faithful.