At the recommendation of an EE professor, I adopted EMACS as an undergraduate in the first few years of the 3rd millennium. I stuck with it for about 18 years,

At the recommendation of an EE professor, I adopted EMACS as an undergraduate in the first few years of the 3rd millennium. I stuck with it for about 18 years, including stumbling through a handful of custom elisp scripts to get some stuff done that I wanted. With the advent of VMs in data centers, I found that constantly installing EMACS started to become a real chore, and vi was just always present in base images. Also, always needing to remap caps lock and left ctrl was obnoxious, especially as I moved between Linux, Windows, and MacOS environments. So last year I bit the bullet and went fully into vi. First I did some research into the scriptability of the editor, and upon learning that I could hook events via autocmd that call into custom Python code, that was it for me. I wasn't interested at all in struggling to figure out some arcane (to me) elisp invocation just to do some simple text manipulation, when I already knew Python well enough to just get done what I wanted with minimal trial-and-error. Plus the wealth of libraries available from pip and Vundle pretty much gives me all the extensibility and integration with other toolsets I could possibly want. I spent some time practicing the key combinations for stuff I would effortlessly "just do" in EMACS: split window, jump to the bottom window in the frame, open a buffer, find text, highlight and copy, jump back to the other frame, record macro and run it 12 times, yank words/lines, re-indent region, etc. Aside from muscle memory, there really wasn't anything keeping me with EMACS any more. I still am not quite as proficient in vi as I was in EMACS, but at the same time my career has moved away from 100% coding to more a mix of emails, documents, and occasionally some code, so maybe that has something to do with my departure from the EMACS world. I care more about the hassle of having to install EMACS in various environments I jump into as I'm working with nodes in the data center than I do about my level of comfort and proficiency in EMACS.