vi has always been a full-screen visual editor, as in display screen visual, not teletype visual. The paper-oriented predecessors to vim/vi were ed and ex. Like

vi has always been a full-screen visual editor, as in display screen visual, not teletype visual. The paper-oriented predecessors to vim/vi were ed and ex. Like you I used teletype-oriented editors until vi came along, about the same time I got my own ADM-3A, the same dumb terminal Bill Joy used to develop vi on. I think most of us who learned vi back when it was simple have the keystrokes burned into our brains, and we know that vi is quite efficient once learned. I still use vim but not any plugins or extensions and I don't write scripts for it, because I just forget about them anyway and they aren't going to be installed on the GUI-less servers I ssh into. I use a more modern editor (TextMate) most of the time. I don't think vi or vim are terrible, but they can feel clunky on modern GUI-based operating systems. A serious driver should know how to shift a manual transmission. A serious programmer or sys admin should know how to manipulate files and text with standard UNIX tools and editors. vi may not be the best text editor depending on how you measure "best," but it is ubiquitous and does the job it was intended for. My advice for vim users is to start with the vanilla install, no plugins. Learn to configure things you really need in the .vimrc file. If you find yourself creating a complex and over-personalized editing environment to save the occasional keystroke or make vim work like an IDE, you are shooting yourself in the foot in the long run. You may as well just use Eclipse.