I am comfortable in Emacs and quite good with vim. Both do get in my way, which is why I moved to Sublime Text for text editing.
I don't live in my text editor. I spend most of my time in IntelliJ or Visual Studio. The conventions of normal text editors are largely established, and so something that runs counter to those normal conventions--an emacs or a vim--do get in my way. It is a mental gearshift to go "oh, I need to do something different now", which is a drain on my concentration and a way to get annoyed and off track because I tried to go Ctrl-A in Visual Studio and it didn't do what I wanted it to do. The productivity benefit of not having to make my brain go modal or instantly remap my mental keybindings to use emacs even outweighed losing the extensions I liked (vimwiki has been largely replaced by Evernote for me now).
And, yes, VS or IntelliJ are more important than my text editor. They win by default--"Well, use vim/emacs for everything!" is unacceptable for reasons that should be obvious. Vim and emacs are nonstandard at their own peril, and conforming to them is a worse use of my time than using something that conforms to expectations.
That you don't "get" how I can stand it is OK; the important thing is that I can.
I spend most of my time in IntelliJ or Visual Studio.
It's understandable then why you don't like Vim/Emacs. Yes, working with IntelliJ/Eclipse/Visual Studio is painful for me too.
True anecdote - whenever I'm working with Eclipse, I have a shortcut that opens the current file in Emacs for me.
Vim and emacs are nonstandard at their own peril
I spend my time with Unix-related tools mostly, and Emacs/Vim shortcuts are not as nonstandard as you think. The Bash shell for instance uses Emacs shortcuts. In fact, all shells (like irb or ipython) powered by Readline also use Emacs shortcuts.
That you don't "get" how I can stand it is OK;
the important thing is that I can.
Don't take it as a criticism on yourself; I said that mostly because I'm pretty annoyed with Textmate - it does some things really well but other (IMHO important) features are totally retarded.
I don't live in my text editor. I spend most of my time in IntelliJ or Visual Studio. The conventions of normal text editors are largely established, and so something that runs counter to those normal conventions--an emacs or a vim--do get in my way. It is a mental gearshift to go "oh, I need to do something different now", which is a drain on my concentration and a way to get annoyed and off track because I tried to go Ctrl-A in Visual Studio and it didn't do what I wanted it to do. The productivity benefit of not having to make my brain go modal or instantly remap my mental keybindings to use emacs even outweighed losing the extensions I liked (vimwiki has been largely replaced by Evernote for me now).
And, yes, VS or IntelliJ are more important than my text editor. They win by default--"Well, use vim/emacs for everything!" is unacceptable for reasons that should be obvious. Vim and emacs are nonstandard at their own peril, and conforming to them is a worse use of my time than using something that conforms to expectations.
That you don't "get" how I can stand it is OK; the important thing is that I can.