As much as I've been complaining about Vim in this thread, I don't think it's evil, or anything. But I do love Emaca as much as you love Vi, for much the same reasons (although some of those one character commands make me envious). You could always use both (the non-religious option).

Come to the dark side. We have macros.

OK I'll make you a deal, as soon as I've mastered every feature in Vim I'll move on to Emacs. :)

Which reminds me, I must reread that stackoverflow post about grokking vi again.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-most...

That's an incredibly useful post.

Anyways, I only suggested it because you seemed interested. There's certainly no requirement to do so. And since you'll never master every feature in Vim, you'll never use Emacs if you have that requirement.

The sad thing about Vi is its Lisp mode: the original Vi had a pretty nice mode for editing Lisp, which most clones have not recreated.