Hehe, well I won't say it's better, I would try both and find which one you prefer. I'm a Vim fan however. I'd recommend reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war
I am also a Vim fan aka Vi Improved. But now except for quick one-liner or short scripts, I wrote my code in Textpad and then FTP or SCP over. It is still more efficient to use a friendly with syntax highlighting etc text editors :P
HAHA! A vim vs. emacs discussion - delightful. Long story short: Vim wins ;)
What kind of Laptop you're on? If you like real sharp performance, have look at crunchbang or similar distro's. My netbook boots in a few secs and runs like a "big one" avoiding this costy stuff ubuntu comes with...
My desktop is running Ubuntu though...both are debian based...
¿Do you mean a graphical interface? There is gvim (I didn't try it)
Put this in your ~/.vimrc
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
"tab
set autoindent
set tabstop=4
"set expandtab "if you want spaces
set shiftwidth=4
set nu "line numbers
syntax on "highlighting (detects the language automagically, you can set it with setf)
"set hlsearch "resalt found text
"Set up a template acording to the type of the file
autocmd! BufNewFile * silent! 0r ~/.vim/skeletons/template.%:e
"etc (important)