I have used or had to use multiple IDEs at various points over my unix career but for the first 4 or 5 years I was all about emacs and for the last 20 years I’v

I have used or had to use multiple IDEs at various points over my unix career but for the first 4 or 5 years I was all about emacs and for the last 20 years I’ve used vim. It’s been fantastic for me and it continues to be useful every single day. Whether it’s “worth the trouble” for you really depends on you, what you value and what you do so it’s hard/impossible for anyone else to judge that for you. But if you’d asked 2000 me why I used vim I would have said because it’s great to be able to use the same editor for fixing config files over laggy remote ssh connections, or writing perl as for writing my email. If you’d asked 2005 me I would have said it’s great to be able to use the same editor for bash and python scripts as I use for massive Java and c++ codebases. If you’d asked 2011-ish me I would have said it’s cool that the editor I already know well supports these new languages I want to learn like haskell and scala, etc… Fast forward to yesterday and I spent 5 hours writing latex in vim and of course it works great. So I guess what I’m driving at is this. You have no idea where life will take you and what you will end up doing but having this transferrable set of skills so you know whatever you’re trying to do with a computer you have a toolbox that you can apply to get a leg up on any new problem is very valuable. The one real advantage of something like vim that is very hard for any normal IDE to replicate is that it could be part of that toolbox no matter what. You have to decide whether that’s valuable for you. And you really don’t have to maintain any kind of up-to-date setup. I occasionally tinker because I like tinkering but the vast bulk of my vimrc I wrote in like 2002 or so and has remained unchanged. Every now and again I add a single line to add or remove a plugin, but it’s really not the be-all/end-all to make changes.