After doing a lot of work on a specific project, you aren't going to be writing code very frequently. Most of your work will go towards manipulating, editing, a

After doing a lot of work on a specific project, you aren't going to be writing code very frequently. Most of your work will go towards manipulating, editing, and applying minor (or major) fixes to your existing codebase. When you aren't in insert mode, it's easy to navigate to specific lines (g), scan quickly through the document (^D, ^B), scan through lines (b,e), change/delete stuff (c,d,C,D,s,etc. Quick commands like ci" will Change Inside Quotes, so for example you can edit strings very quickly.), and search (/, , #, n, N). As well, like tlunter said, vim is very portable. If you have to hop on someone else's computer to change some of their local code, there almost certainly* will be an editor that you can use quickly and efficiently. It also loads very quickly.