It's all good, just be careful with words like "standard" and phrases like "like most people". They can subconsciously hinder learning. This is a subject that

It's all good, just be careful with words like "standard" and phrases like "like most people". They can subconsciously hinder learning. This is a subject that has been hashed to death online, especially in Vim vs Emacs discussions. Emacs behaves more like an IDE, as an environment rather than a tool. Vim is further along the tool side of the spectrum (though I sense Plan 9's Acme is even further along; Vim is actually pretty moderate, believe it or not). Gvim tries to bisect the difference, but I find it to be the worst of both worlds: not as nice an experience as say Idea or PyCharm, but also encouraging "bad habits" from the terminal point of view, such as using the mouse. Or navigating where you are in the system from within the editor rather than the shell. I actually do use multiple windows and Alt-tab between them. It's just that most of them are terminal/shell/tmux windows. I do use other apps too (like a web browser). But for text processing and navigation the shell is what I like best. Anecdotally Vim users seem more sensitive to even small latencies, and GUIs invariably seem to introduce lag. Though I'm finding that I'm more tolerant of lag in my non-shell windows. Using VimAnywhere has made that clear because it causes the "universes to collide". This whole question is actually not that important, in my opinion. You were right above that it's mostly about what way you start out in. If you're reasonably effective with one set of tools, to try to switch is to bait big to catch small. There's far better uses of your time out there. Perhaps the only thing to learn is that there are many ways to skin the cat. There, now move on.