Vim isn’t for everyone. I’m not sure exactly what you are looking for, so I don’t know how to recommend Vim to you. The best I can do is recommend reading up on using Vim, trying it out for yourself, and then making a determination. Most of the advanced features are archaic, but if you take the time to learn them, they can dramatically improve performance while editing files.

There is also a graphical version of Vim which you can run with the gvim command. Gvim might be easier to get started with since there are menus with commonly used features (complete with the key combo to use many of them).

A robust document that might help you learn what you can do with Vi/Vim is Learning the vi editor.

I forgot about the mouse question. You can use “:set mouse=a” to activate the mouse features of Vim. This allows scrolling and text selection with the mouse.

When I get ubuntu installed again, I’m definitely going to try vim out. I’m still in search for “the text editor” for my programming needs, and vim’s syntax highlighting and unlimited undos sound like heaven.