The choice of editor is something that every programmer has to make at least once, but often repeatedly over the course of their career. I was a vi+Eclipse user until about four years ago, which was when I made the transition from being a hobby coder to being a professional, and more or less simultaneously to using emacs.
What I've found is that emacs has rewarded every bit of time I've spent learning it with increased capability. I still cannot recommend it for writing Java -- Eclipse/NetBeans/IntelliJ are so much better than any mere text editor for that -- but for configuration file editing, C coding, scripting emacs provides everything you might want, and more. The latest versions (bleeding edge stuff, sadly, still unreleased) even support TrueType fonts in gnome.
It'll be painful. Changing tools always is. But yes, you should try to learn it. You won't regret it.
