Maybe try thinking of vi as a programming language (for interacting with text) rather than a text editor. It's really a Human Programming Interface (HPA not API

Maybe try thinking of vi as a programming language (for interacting with text) rather than a text editor. It's really a Human Programming Interface (HPA not API?) which you can run in the line editor of your shell (readline), or in emacs, tmux, even firefox, but of course it works best in vi/vim/nvim. Learning the vi language makes me think about interacting with computers in a new way.