I'm vim poweruser since around 2009. When I use VSCodium (not that much today) I obviously use Vim emulation.

When I use a different editor, there will be lots of jjkk or ,w (I nmap ,w to :w). Habits die hard.

Now I switched to neovim due to the amount of good features I like with it. I use exclusively mini.nvim modules that are awesome.

How does an article like this not mention Bill Joy??

I learned vi in '86 or so mid way through the CS course I did. Later on I used emacs and various other editors for many years. The weird thing is that the basic vi commands are hardwired in my brain - I could happily edit a file in vi but I'd be stuck if I had to use emacs (even though I actually used emacs for far longer)...

The first work i had to use vi and screen on a terminal, it were in 90s . I was used to dos editors ( edit, turbo C ... ) and windows . It was a pain. copy and paste at first was a nightmare. Copy from one file to another ,with named register and # was an hell ( it was vi not vim so only 2 files a time ,the actual edited and the prior ones ). I hated that place, that work, those tool for a while . I got so used to vi, to modify columns with regular expression or macro that now, more than 30 years after , vi/vim is the first thing I install on a PC and when i have to modify a file, or to do something complex, the first and last resort for doing it without python or perl, is always vi . But the beginning at 25 years old was very hard because it was a kind of editing even at those time completely out of my usual way to work . Now it is the only editor that i open and use without thinking . VSCode is great, tons of features, but when i see all those menu, if i can, i use vi . I would add a point. for a while i went behind vim features, try to learn them and use them but they are too many and i often work on different machine so i can not move my setup everywhere. Learning the "old vi way" of doing things (motion, regexp,registers, macros ) can seem "limiting", but at the end you can do quite everything with the same tool .

I first used ed(1) back in the ye olden days of early 1980s, vi was like a major advance.

Came in handy when I had to talk a guy through updating a Solaris config file to allow the box to boot when he only had a serial console in the early 2000s.

I had a mini holiday job working for (long since gone from NZ) Philips Design and Development Laboratory in 1992. As part of that I worked on some tools for their silicon graphics workstations. I was shown vi, and how to get help and left to it. Tough learning curve! Seemed ridiculous at first, then I developed a mini set of editing skills and got used to it! Still using Vim/Nvim today.

When I was in college in 2001, I went to the library and checked out Kaare Christian's book called "The UNIX Operating System". One of the early chapters covered vi - I'd telnet into the school's Sun server with a pretty early version of vi (one-level undo) and follow the examples. Never looked back!

vis is absolutely great. Wish more people were aware of it (and it's cool it is mentioned in the post) and that more people used it. I still miss some features from vim, like buffers, but feels so much snappier, lighter and intuitive - and the structural regular expressions part is outstanding.

Long ago I wrote my own really incomplete vi subset for the C64 that I really should dust off. But there's a more polished vi clone for 6502 machines, including the C64, Apple II and Atari: https://vi65.sourceforge.net/

I wonder if people who stuck with vi(m) know about Xerox PARC, wysiwyg, gui and nomodes.