I used vi and then vim for years (decades) before VSCode came along. At the time I learned vi it was worth the effort, because the alternatives were terrible. F

I used vi and then vim for years (decades) before VSCode came along. At the time I learned vi it was worth the effort, because the alternatives were terrible. For me learning vi/vim has paid off, but I learned it over time, out of necessity, with some deliberate practice. If you can always use an IDE then do that and don't worry about vim or emacs. There's no actual club of greybeard CLI hackers who will not let you join if you can't h-j-k-l everything. If you need to work directly on a server over ssh, especially a server you don't control, you will probably have to use a terminal-based editor. If vi/vim is too much use nano. Our brains can learn multiple editors, multiple programming languages, multiple frameworks, etc. I never understand the questions that pose a false dichotomy: should I learn vim or VSCode? Python or Clojure? You can of course learn them all. And if you use something every day you will get better with it. If you take the time to practice you will get even better. Whether that investment of time and effort pays off eventually, hard to say, but knowing vi/vim well enough to edit code has paid off for me and a lot of other people, so I'd call it low risk/potential high reward. I also learned VSCode well enough to use it, so hedging my bets.