You don't need to master vim as some other commenters seem to think. I've been using vim for 10+ years, but have relatively little of the manual committed to me

You don't need to master vim as some other commenters seem to think. I've been using vim for 10+ years, but have relatively little of the manual committed to memory. You can learn enough to be productive in a day. The muscle memory comes quickly especially if you align your other tools with it. For example I run my shell's line editor in vi mode, have my window manager configured for keyboard-driven operation with a vi-like navigation scheme, `:set -g mode-keys vi` in tmux, and use one of the vimperator clones in my browser. So I never go very long without using the same patterns.