I'd say it's an old interface, but that it's still state of the art (there's a reason there's a vi/vim mode or plugin for every major editor except emacs and th

I'd say it's an old interface, but that it's still state of the art (there's a reason there's a vi/vim mode or plugin for every major editor except emacs and that you've seen a resurgence of modal editors as the programming world has moved away from boilerplate laden languages). Don't think of it as knowledge competing for headspace for languages and quirks but as knowledge that augments those arcane bits. For your :q! example, it looks daunting but you really don't end up memorizing it verbatim like that, much like you don't memorize adding semicolons verbatim to the end of your C# lines of code or adding closing tags to markup languages, it's just part of the language, a line end implicitly requires a semicolon so you just do it, vim commands are prefixed with colons so you just do that too. The q is quit, which is hardly any worse than remembering Cmd-q or Ctrl-q is quitting for OS level shortcuts and the exclamation mark means "force", so it's usually unnecessary unless you're trying to quit without saving your changes, or doing something the command otherwise wouldn't normally allow. The exclamation mark is used in tandem with other commands too, so you don't mentally remember ":q! is how I quit a file without saving changes", you memorize how to build up the command you want, "I want to issue a command, type a colon" then "I want to quit the editor, type a q", then "I want to quit without saving, so force it, type an exclamation mark". And if it really bothers you, you can configure vim to prompt you for an action if it would normally require a ! and you left it off.