>>30
You don't need to know all the vi/emacs commands to do what you said either: C-< C-<space> C-> M-w, in emacs, or 1GyG in vi. It should only take you about one day, and not months, to learn these basic commands in either editor.
Also, you can still write your perl or ruby scripts to do your more complex things, if you don't want to learn elisp.