The main benefit is that the effort to learn Vim is transferrable to other programming languages and environments. Editing a config file over SSH is the same a

The main benefit is that the effort to learn Vim is transferrable to other programming languages and environments. Editing a config file over SSH is the same as working with Python is the same as working with Javascript. This gets especially convenient if you work with multi-language projects, where you would otherwise find yourself switching between programming environments for a single task.