Vim is very well baked in to our culture. If you have keyboard shortcuts enabled in Gmail, it's vi commands. Not going anywhere soon. And most IDEs have a vi mo

Vim is very well baked in to our culture. If you have keyboard shortcuts enabled in Gmail, it's vi commands. Not going anywhere soon. And most IDEs have a vi mode if that's your thing. I find the keyboard interface fast, fast, fast. Vim itself is useful if you have to do anything on the command line and once you learn the basics you'll ditch pico and all the others and never look back for doing any non-trivial editing. Extending vim (or emacs) is largely the trick - you need the right plugins to support the type of things you're working on - go to github and search for vim config and you'll find 8,050 repos with peoples favorite setups, often with instructional videos or text. Certain programming jobs are legitimately faster with vim and the right plugins, others, especially if you're working in a team environment that uses an IDE are obviously better with an IDE. A friend was in your shoes a few years back (young, starting out) became a vim guru, aced a job interview now writes java/clojure with IntelliJ as does the rest of his team. I asked him, he is super glad he learned vim so well but can't imagine working on his current codebase with it, but he still uses vim regularly and often. And I liked vram22's comment about automation. I learned it as '3 or more use a for' which has boiled out to if you find yourself doing something 3 or more times, think of a way to abstract or automate it.