For much of my career I was in the same camp you're in. I did field tech, sysadmin (Windows), and then went the IT management route for a long time. Early on

For much of my career I was in the same camp you're in. I did field tech, sysadmin (Windows), and then went the IT management route for a long time. Early on I did pick up some vi, but only because in my field tech days I was working on small doctor office billing systems: single servers usually running Xenix(!) or SCO OpenServer(!) and vi was the only editor available: to this day I can reliably get into insert mode, save the file, and exit vi and no more without looking it up. Emacs I had the same breadth of skills until about a month ago. I always used a GUI text editor of some sort, though sometime specialized. In more recent years, I've oddly enough become much more directly involved in software development. I live in Sublime Text and occasionally an IDE... Eclipse, Netbeans... QT Creator a fair amount. But I've been learning Emacs: I need to write estimates and, depending on the engagement, track time and such. I've found that, of all the online services and other software I have, the best tool to get things done was Emacs & org-mode with some fairly extensive config to customize the org-mode behavior; I even got Gnus up and running. I couldn't use it for coding because about 75% of what I do is database development (PostgreSQL schema stuff, PL/pgSQL) and I couldn't get the damn indentation behavior behaved so now I'm in both: Sublime Text for development and Emacs for organization.