text editor suggestion?

[John Salerno]

Ben Finney wrote:

> The two big names in text editing, Vim and Emacs, will both meet these
> criteria easily. They also have the advantage that you'll find one or
> the other, or both, on just about any Unix system intended for use by
> a programmer.
>
> There is also an enormous amount of support for both these editors,
> for all manner of text editing tasks, available online. It's a good
> idea to learn at least one of them very well, rather than learn a
> bunch of less-popular editors for specific tasks.
> 

I'd really like to learn vim, but I spent days just trying to figure out 
how to get the syntax highlighting and indentation working, where these 
settings are and how to edit them, and it still doesn't work for me. It 
just feels so insurmountable that I can't even start working with it yet 
because I don't know how to tailor the settings.