Well it depends on whether you are editing or writing code. If you are writing code you just need easy navigation, code folding and basic search. When you are

Well it depends on whether you are editing or writing code. If you are writing code you just need easy navigation, code folding and basic search. When you are editing code or config files you need a whole array of different features: 1. Regular Expression matching (And substitution) 2. Edit in place (Specially with space sensitive configs) 3. Key shortcuts (You could copy paste a code 30 times or just "yank and paste repeat 30" with 3 vim commands) 4. Scripting. Whether you like to do emacs-lisp-magic or just raw vim, sometimes you just need to script your code. 5. GDB (Most IDEs take care of this, but emacs/vim + gdb works great for command line dev). 6. Vi is included in any Unix or Unix like environment and can be usable even from the slowest SSH or Telnet session (Once or twice I have had to edit config files over my smartphone and restart the servers, vi visual edit commands are a godsend when you don't have a mouse). So if you are just an "Developer" hacker, it's ok to just use IDEs but for me any respectable "Sysadmin" hacker does need to know this stuff.Plus in my book any Dev must at least know how to setup a LAMP server without a GUI, though I know some PHP kiddies won't agree.