Kudos to you. I have tried and failed miserably to learn emacs many times. The switch from vi seems to be really hard but I really like emacs and hope to become a pro user someday.
After running :terminal, is there a way to yank text from my editor window and paste it into the terminal? Likewise, is there a way to copy text from the output of a command (run in the terminal) and paste it into the other window?