This describes me. I really, really want to like Emacs and learn to use it, but coming from vim, such heavy use of the meta keys just feels wrong.
With that said I'm trying to use emacs org mode to keep myself organized, which works great! But I would never trade it with vim as my code editor, not in a million years. Sorry.
So what I really needed was a use case to make me use it properly. Once you see the awesome power of Org-Mode and try to imagine what else you could do, you see the potential of Emacs. After that, it is the all-too-well-known cycle of "This is rather tedious", "there has to be a better way to do this" and finally discovering yet another new keyboard shortcut.
Also, get into the habit of using isearch (C-s, C-r) as a replacement for many of the Vim search commands (fFtT/? etc.). This makes Emacs a lot more manageable if you are used to Vim motions.
But really, I don't feel the need to use only Emacs or Vim. I switch freely between them depending on the task at hand.
That said, I did and do have trouble getting over the fact that Emacs seems to be unable to handle mousewheel-scrolling properly and has rather poor support for code folding. Not deal breakers, those, but come on, this is 2012!
It wasn't the various alternate modes that enticed me so much as a more consistent buffer model for file-find, greps, and compiles. And I'm very happy not to have that constant "am I in insert or command mode?" problem. The control keys are now second nature.
Try, try again!
I tried emacs with viper and vimpulse recently, and found that while they did make emacs a lot less painful, they were a far cry from making a long-time vim user comfortable in emacs.
The biggest problem is that in order to configure emacs and bind functions to keys you have to invest a lot of time in reading documentation and finding out about emacs.
If you have that sort of time to invest, great. But I didn't, especially since I already know vim very well and feel completely comfortable using and configuring it. Switching to emacs just didn't seem worth the time investment in my particular case.
I have heard that evil was a better vim emulation mode for emacs, and I've been meaning to give it a try, but haven't gotten around to it yet -- and I'm still skeptical of it addressing my main concern, which is that to really use emacs effectively (even in vim emulation mode) you'd have to invest a lot of time in learning the emacsy parts.
There is one other major issue that none of emacs' vim emulation modes address, which is the thousands of vim plugins available on www.vim.org. You might, in the best case, get all the standard vim keybindings for emacs, but you'd still be forced to use emacs scripts and plugins, instead of the vim scripts and plugins you like and are used to. Learning and transitioning to those is yet another big time sink right there.
One of the main reasons that I switched to emacs was to use SLIME to interface with Common Lisp. But SLIME is a huge program, and learning to use it and configure viper/vimpulse to bind keyboard shortcuts to its functions requires spending a lot of time learning about and understanding SLIME. It's just so much simpler to one of the less feature-rich vim plugins to develop code in CL. Yes, you'd miss out on some great SLIME features, but you would also not have to spend a ton of time learning SLIME and configuring viper/vimpulse to work with it.
It's true though that if you're heavily invested in vim plugins there's fair time sink in getting up to speed on the emacs equivalents. Everything's a tradeoff.
But I like the Vi input model so much that I want to be able to use it in Emacs. I've understood that "evil" is the preferred Emacs-Vi-input layer these days (instead of viper or other alternatives). I'm going to use Emacs 24.
Any suggestions for migrating from Vim to Emacs?
Still, unless you start using a vi emulation mode or keychords.el you will always be stuck with the meta keys. For me this was no problem since vi's modal approach to editing always rubbed me the wrong way. (I used Vim for almost 10 years before making the switch to Emacs.)
Yes, I use Emacs. And yes, I use Meta (Alt) keys sparingly. I think the only Meta-chord I use is Alt-Tab to switch applications.
Are you always so pleasant? Who pissed in your wheaties?