I didn't follow your example exactly, but I think it is similar to what I'd do with Emacs macros. I would record things like "move cursor to end of word", "skip two words", "capitalize word" and so on, which were all available as keyboard shortcuts, and then just press "repeat macro five times", done.

I enjoyed working like that, also because one feels rather clever doing such things, but as I said, it didn't come up that much anymore with Eclipse. I am also not sure if I was really that much faster, because I often had to look up stuff like how to skip a word and so on.

However, I am very curious about vim and Emacs, as I am currently considering to switch back. Mostly I would really like an editor that allows me to extend it myself quickly. One can write Eclipse plugins, but I don't know how complicated it is. Maybe not that complicated - but it certainly would have to be in Java, which I'd like to get away from.

Probably I'll switch back to Emacs, as I already know it a little bit. I am worried that Emacs LISP is too messy to be worthwhile to learn, though (I am more of a Scheme person, I guess).

I never knew Vim was so extendible, it certainly sounds very interesting. I am not much of a Unix shell wizard, though - although I wouldn't mind becoming better at that, either (I've read that extending Vim draws on shell commands?).

Btw., what made me switch to Eclipse was a project that Emacs couldn't handle. It was J2ME programming, and back then as much code as possible had to go into one file. So I had a 10000 lines code file, and Emacs would just crash or not do much. It was also impossible to navigate without the "abstract code view" (which let's you click on methods and jump to their position in the code). My colleagues were using Eclipse and laughing about me... There are other niceties about Eclipse, like the local history or good svn integration.

It certainly seems a bit of a drag to set up Emacs for coding again (Ruby on Rails would be my next target). It can do a lot of things, like jumping to code snippets and so on, but first you have to set it up, somehow. As I said, I am lazy, I'd rather have an Editor or IDE that is configured properly out of the box.

I wasn't so impressed with Netbeans for RoR, though. Didn't look at it for long, but it didn't even help you fill in the parameters for the code generators - it merely provided some buttons to run them. If I could extend my editor easily, I would make something better (hopefully I will).