> Have you had any experience with Vim? Is the learning curve too steep? I had read good things and I downloaded it, but have yet to give it a try.

Vim is all I use for text editing. It's harder to learn than most, yes, but once you get used to it, you can be very fast with it, because your hands don't have to be moving back and forth to the mouse all the time. You don't even need to move to the arrow keys, although you can.

There are probably tutorials for it out there to get you started, but start with the basics. It's so feature-rich that you can use it for years and still be learning new things about what it can do. But you don't need to know a whole huge amount just to get started.