It's a student run course, so I assume one of the reason they selected VIM is that instructors were proficient in it. It's also one of the few modal editors ou

It's a student run course, so I assume one of the reason they selected VIM is that instructors were proficient in it. It's also one of the few modal editors out there, and that's a different paradigm students might not have been exposed to. In comparison, Emacs is much more similar to Sublime or VSCode (always insert, functions invoked via shortcuts).