Your first couple of paragraphs are spot on, but they in no way justify your assertions about vim. Your last paragraph suggests that learning an editor like vi

Your first couple of paragraphs are spot on, but they in no way justify your assertions about vim. Your last paragraph suggests that learning an editor like vim takes up enough time that it detracts from learning important software engineering principles. I'd like to suggest that learning vim, though scary at first, is not nearly as bad as all that. You pick up more and more of it as you go, and the accumulated bits of time saved over a long period more than make up for the time you spent getting over the learning curve. "Modem-era"? I assume you don't use any "modem-era" command line interfaces, programming languages, APIs, protocols, or operating systems.