I've learned to love the modal nature of vim, or rather, the notion that text entry ('insert' mode) is merely one aspect of manipulating text. The combination of movement of commands is very powerful and these days I feel naked when I use editors without this ability.<p>My first dedicated text editor was BBedit (when it was still freeware), and for many years had extended experiments with other editors, always eventually returning to BBEdit. Something about it always clicked with me, and I felt like Siegel and co. fundamentally understood both the Mac and the needs of programmers.<p>These days I keep BBedit around for its excellent diff tool, syntax-highlighted multi-file grep search and replace, and its decent project browsing. But it's mostly a supplement to vim (MacVim), which I use all the time when I'm actually in there editing text.