I had to use lower case:
(cua-mode t)
(transient-mark-mode 1)
(setq cua-keep-region-after-copy t)

but this works great, thanks

I have the opposite problem of trying to kill (C-k) and yank (C-y) lines outside of Emacs.

I can confirm that, “gI” works. Thanks for that tip!

@ths Try “gI” for inserting at the left most column

emacs was my standard editor on OS/2, when I was developing software with gcc. The C developer mode is so great and convenient, both when you call make, and when you use gdb to debug things.
I think I made acquaintance with emacs at 18.51 in university, and on OS/2 I used em’s great port of 19.something.
At work usually the unix OS people I have to rely on don’t bother installing anything else, so I have to stick with vi, and eventually I grow to like it (but I needed some years for this to happen).
My bash/ksh command line is still in Emacs mode, not vi mode ;)

Only recently I discovered the quite convenient subcommand “t” for “to” (delete to character, works like the “f” and “F”, e.g. d t % deletes upto and not including the next percent char).
I’d still like to know how to switch on insert mode at column 1. “I” only inserts before the first non-whitespace; sometimes I definitely want to insert leftmost (e.g. a comment character).

Well, I like Emacs well enough, but I’ve grown away from it during the last few months. I usually use Kate while under a GUI and jed under a terminal… jed is close enough to Emacs though, right?

LOL!

I have also heard you can go blind if you emacs too much. :P

Anyway, I’m planning to balance on the fine edge between the dark and the light side – vim is still my default text editor for almost everything, while I’m planning to use emacs for certain specialized tasks like Lisp… And maybe LaTex.

Noooo, don’t go to the dark side. Stay with Vim! If you start using emacs, your ctrl key will break ;)

Also, you might want to double-check your title. It’s 75% correct :D

Actually in vim I usually just dd or yank a line, and paste it with p. Otherwise I just copy and paste with the mouse. But I just didn’t feel like learning yet another way of copying and pasting for Emacs. :P

Vi user myself (I’ve never gotten into lisp), but I can sympathize. I installed Cream, which makes Vi take “normal” shortcuts. This helped my productivity noticeably as well.