Agreed. The trick is to be away from your comfort zone periodically, so you can retain the mnemonics of vanilla bash/vim but take advantage of zsh's nice featur

Agreed. The trick is to be away from your comfort zone periodically, so you can retain the mnemonics of vanilla bash/vim but take advantage of zsh's nice features as well. I typically don't have ZSH running on any remote server I work on (except my personal VPS) for precisely this reason, it helps me keep the vanilla shortcuts in memory. But realistically, most my custom configuration is suited to working with large projects that have lots of files. I never open the whole project up in shell vim on the remote server, if I'm gonna be doing that I might as well just open it locally and push to Git. I feel that configuration should build on top of the editor/shell you're already using, not modify it so heavily that it renders the vanilla shell unrecognizable.