The vintage mode is excellent. It's the best emulation of vim that I've used.

Sadly I can't run ST2 on our work machines as the RHEL version we use has a libc (glibc?) that is too old. I'm unable to host my own libc due to a binary format change that is incompatible with the system dynamic loader.

Which ones have you tried? Vintage mode is most impressive considering it's so small (code-wise), but I don't find it particularly good at even the basics (a lot of commands have subtle behavioural differences).

It's better than IDEAVim, but certainly ViEmu and jVi are better. Maybe even Vrapper and XVim beat it too.

Vrapper for eclipse is a good one too. Mostly what I've tried is whatever people have put out for emacs. Viper or something like that.

No, you can only use a very small subset of Vi shortcuts and it becomes very tiny if we compare it to Vim.