Climbing the steep learning curve of VIM in search of folding heaven

Thanks to the very limited support for folding (compacting a text area to increase the overview of a large file) in the text editor I normally use (UltraEdit), I've been giving the open source VIM editor a spin.

Boy is this different. VIM is an improved version of the Unix VI editor and comes with all the obscurity and power you would expect. Most importantly, the folding capabilities in the new version 6 are really nice. You can operate with multiple levels of folding, add new lines to existing folds, open and close multiple folds at a time and everything else you ever wanted folding to do.

Whoever, as stated the incredible power of VIM comes with a hefty price of obscurity. There seems to be literally hundreds of hotkey short cuts and everything behaves a lot different from what you as a Windows user would expect. The investment required to learn this would normally have me bailing in no time, but I'm sticking through it.

Learning VIM doesn't seem like such hard work if you're thinking of it as an expansion of your horizon (learning a radically different interface from what you're used to). And you get the ability to command an extremely powerful editor to show for it when you're done.