EMACS, VI, Slickedit

It is always nice to work in an UNIX environment. The variety of tools and utilities is incredible and many have been refined over decades to be fast and efficient. I'm a big fan of the Slickedit editor (as evident by the fact that I have a forum for it on my site), but alas Slickedit discontinued the version that runs on the platform I use at work so it is no longer an option. The two heavy weights of editors are EMACS and VI, but I'm not going to go in to a holy war about which one is better. I've always been more of an EMACS guy, so I picked it up again and started to get my proficiency back (not that I was very proficient to start with). I think it's good to also know more VI so I'll probably try to spend some time with it also, but for now I'm using EMACS. As powerful as EMACS is, I sometimes miss the ease of Slickedit.

I got "Learning GNU Emacs 3rd Edition" and "Learning the vi Editor 6th Edition" (both published by O'Reilley) and I would recommend the EMACS book if you're just starting out. It is clearly written, very practical and has good real-life examples. The VI book is only so-so. I got the basics of VI from it but really didn't feel I learned any new "tricks".