I am looking for tips for learning Vim or Emacs the smart way

Question

I am a quite happy user of Eclipse (I mostly develop in PHP and Python), however I found the answers to \"What specific productivity gains does Vim/Emacs provide over GUI text e

Answer 1

This should really just be a comment, but against which answer ...

With Vim I'd suggest using the GUI version for a start, just dive in, the built-in help is excellent (:h and the screen splits adding a panel with comprehensive "hyperlinked" help pages). With vim the only potentially dangerous operation is a write, everything else you do is recoverable per command or edit (undo & redo).

The power acquired easily incentivises the learning.