Aside from the other comments, you're missing a huge part of what vim is about if you think that it's vim vs. every other IDE. I use IDE's but I use a vim plugi

Aside from the other comments, you're missing a huge part of what vim is about if you think that it's vim vs. every other IDE. I use IDE's but I use a vim plugin in every single one to enable the vim key binding so I can enjoy all the IDE has to offer AND vim at the same time. It's not just about the editor itself (which I will talk more about), it's about the editing paradigm it introduces. A paradigm that emphasizes programming efficiency over familiarity. I understand that trade off isn't for everyone though. In contrast to what I just wrote, the ubiquitous nature of vim is a huge factor for anyone who does a lot of work on a number of remote servers where it's not feasible to use a GUI-based IDE. You can use nano if you really don't want to learn vim but I'd love to hear someone make a case for using nano over vim. You may only need to deal with this for 'basic server side administration tasks' but a lot of people have to do a significant amount of work on multiple servers due to data access and resource availability issues. In addition, there is also the fact that a number of command line tools use vim key bindings for navigation (eg. man, less, more) *Edit: grammar