Ctrl + a doesn't work in Bash Terminal on OS X Lion

I had this problem for a while and just ignored it for a while till it was unbearable. Well after googling a bit I came across stackoverflows answer. ^A and ^E are commands of bash's “emacs mode”. All I had to do was in the terminal type

r2d2:~ satyajit$ set -o 

and found out vi was set to on and emacs to off. I edited ~/.bashrc to add:

set -o emacs

And yes got the key bindings back to ^A & ^E.

This got me wondering on the set - o to vi mode. I am a HUGE fan of vi. I love the modal editing so why not just use it. In fact it seems better than ^A and ^E. Love the vi key bindings.