It isn't just the look, it really is an antiquated text editor, based on even more antiquated text editors. Though a well maintained one with a very active fork

It isn't just the look, it really is an antiquated text editor, based on even more antiquated text editors. Though a well maintained one with a very active fork in neovim. There are arguably better IDEs for programming and easier text editors that are still very powerful and support customisation and extensibility. Being a reasonably small editor with a text based UI I can easily use it to edit files anywhere and on any sort of hardware with great performance and opening up a file to make a quick change is practically instant. And then being able to navigate around, edit and change different types of text objects isn't something all that common outside of the vi world I think. It is probably most suited to people who want quick mouseless editing of text and already work in a *nix command line environment. First impressions aren't great and I am sure lots of people give up and use something else including myself. But then my needs changed and I found vim (now neovim) was a surpsiingly good fit. Like most editors it needs a few plugins installed and customised to support more complex needs and they aren't a point and click thing like vscode.