There are many things you can say about Emacs...

You can accomplish this if you want to, but please let us try to convince you that you don't want to.

Learn emacs. If you do you will never need to "miss" your editor again, in your entire life. Emacs is open source, it's cross-platform, and it will never die... unless it is replaced by something so great that you will never miss it. Which may never happen. (TextMate is the best alternative I've seen in the last decade, but it has a long way to go.)

You will eventually get emacs into your fingers. Buy Learning Emacs, a very good book. Learn to use kill-and-yank instead of copy-and-paste.

Three keys at once? Am I such an emacs veteran that I just don't notice myself doing that? I guess I do have a few combos like that (C-M-\ , indent-region, is one I use quite a bit) but I have a Kinesis keyboard with Ctrl and Meta mapped to adjacent keys, one set for either hand, and that kind of solves a lot of the problem. One of the reasons I got fed up with TextMate and retreated back to emacs is that I can't stand all the three-key combos that the Mac insists on... it's all command-shift-this and command-option-that, because the Mac refuses to use the emacs prefix approach.

Emacs, of course.

Yes, but ctrl-r runs "Execute Line Inserting Result", which generally causes a brief pause followed by the spewing of some complete gibberish. That bit me approximately ten thousand million times when I switched to TextMate from emacs.

The TextMate equivalent of ctrl-r is ctrl-shift-S. But it somehow doesn't seem to work as well... the semantics are not quite the same, and it isn't as good at remembering the search term from invocation to invocation. And ctrl-shift-S is a nasty three-key combo to have to press every time you want to do something as mundane as move backwards a few lines to a specific word.

I tried to figure out how to remap ctrl-r to the equivalent of ctrl-shift-S. I couldn't figure out how. Which just goes to show that TextMate may be the best editor of the last fifteen years, but it's still not ready for prime time by emacs standards. I'm no elisp wizard, but I managed to figure out how to build my own custom shift-lock key (mapped to C-0) that works only on the top row of the keyboard, so that I can type something like this in emacs

    $extra($foo) = ! $bar; #pretend this was real code

without touching the shift key once. TextMate can't even pretend to let me do something like that.

As you might guess I have heard similar argument a lot already. I don't doubt that switching to emacs can be worth it, that's why I am asking about making it easier for me to start with it. I just don't see why I have to learn a new keymapping when nearly every new application out there uses a keymapping which is rather similar to the one which I am used to.

I'm not looking for emacs to simulate VS. I'm really only interested in mapping the behavior of the mouse and the keyboard to common shortcuts. And you didn't really make an argument why learning another set of combos should be preferred to that. As it seems you rather also mapped it to your liking...

So yes - I want to learn emacs. But no - I don't want to learn that specific keymapping, my current one works fine and every time I tried some emacs tutorial I was appealed by the 3 key combos after a while so much that I did give up. And because I'm not so deep in emacs I don't know yet how to do that, so I hoped that maybe someone else already did it.

Long post ahead.

It's not really that hard...maybe Emacs isn't for you, but I was in your place just six months ago, when I started my CS studies and heard that Emacs could make your life easier. I am still a newbie, but I have started loving the editor.

Here's how to learn.

You need a good cheat sheet, printed and preferably taped to your monitor. You don't need the most arcane keymappings, but you'll need document navigation, search/replace, the escape commands (abort, save, quit), set mark/region, kill and yank (cut and paste, that is). And maybe after a while a quick reference on how to create and kill buffers. I am sorry I have to present it like this, but the keybindings are IMHO the best thing about Emacs when you're a newbie. Don't use the arrow keys! I know that sounds rather ludicrous, but it will save you hours of hand motion in the course of a year. And if at some point you miss a document navigation mapping, it is likely already included in the standard distribution and hence only a web search away. Try for instance http://astro.berkeley.edu/~robishaw/comp/emacs.crib.html.

Actually, you could probably manage it with just document navigation, kill/yank and save/quit. Those will teach you how to hate your mouse. I love it when there's something I can do exclusively in Emacs, because it is so much easier to get my thoughts into bytes. I don't have to worry about any stupid motoric kung-fu. My hands never leave the keyboard.

If you're a newbie, Emacs won't serve you well for all kinds of work. I still prefer Eclipse for Java stuff, because it has a much gentler learning curve for getting debuggers, auto-complete, inspectors and syntax checking in order. You can do all those things in Emacs, but you have to be a lot more dedicated than I have been thus far. For scripting work, however (and that includes just about any Python work et. al.) it is glorious.

Emacs' revered customization won't be of much value to you when you're a newbie (you have to download an emacs lisp file just to change the editor's colors, for instance), but hopefully such details will keep out of your hair until you are familiar enough in the environment to tackle them. My Emacs looks really pretty now, so you know it can be done.

Getting the book that was mentioned seems like an excellent idea. I have been wondering myself whether there was one. Good books make learning a hell of a lot easier than scouring the web.

Good luck to you, I hope you find a solution that makes you happy :)

[Actually, now that I come to think of it, it would be nice if someone made an Emacs distribution with tighter integration to the windowing system. With menu-bars for most of the commands, easier configuration dialogs and all that stuff. Maybe most emacs developers don't care for these things, but it is very intimidating to have to look up every unfamiliar keybinding on the web. Just pulling down a menu and reading it would make the editor much less intimidating. I think the reason most programmers scorn Emacs is that it frightens them, just like LISP.]