If Emacs’s editing model and keybindings are so atrocious, then why not reprogram it? Evil is an Emacs extension that implements Vim in Emacs. It’s been around for a while, and from what I can gather, it’s quite complete. You have all the basic editing commands, can define leader key combinations, the ex commands (the : prompt) are implemented. An advanced Vim user will probably find some things missing. If that’s you please do let me know what it is! I’ve been asking my Vimmy friends and so far haven’t gotten much concrete feedback.

For an upper intermediate user it seems Evil is more than good enough, and it’s only getting better.