Is Vim worth the effort?

I'm the bastard child of IDE's and code completion. Would my workflow be faster if I were familiar with Vim?

Code completion allows you to quickly write large blocks of code. This is appealing to n00bz because they think your typical hacker wakes up and writes 4000 lines of fresh code before going to bed.

The reality is that once your project grows to a moderate size, you're going to spend more time debugging it and making small fixes/changes than you're going to spend writing it. The bulk of the code you do write is going to be mostly repetitive boilerplate.

Once you understand this, vim's modal philosophy starts to make sense and you won't be so shocked to see vim hackers program way faster than their colleagues do in Eclipse.

That said, I don't just go around telling people they should use vim. If you find that your current tools are slowing you down and it's time to move on, then I would recommend it. Run vimtutor to learn the basics. Print out the graphical cheat sheet. Google .vimrc and edit yours. Once you have a few handfuls of commands at your disposal, you'll start to notice how fluidly and effortlessly you make edits. Eventually you'll be looking at a stack trace and without even thinking or touching the mouse you'll fire off a seemingly complex combination of keystrokes and have your bug fixed in less than a second. You'll feel like a god. That's how vim users feel whenever they code.

Can Emacs do most what vim does? Yes. Will it always take more keystrokes? Yes. Will those keystrokes always be less if at all intuitive? Yes. Will you get carpal tunnel syndrome? Yes.