Switching to a vi editor is a one-way trip. Once you have the muscle memory for vi's "normal mode", you become incapable of using any other editor. I started

Switching to a vi editor is a one-way trip. Once you have the muscle memory for vi's "normal mode", you become incapable of using any other editor. I started using vim back in 1997 because it shipped with BeOS, and my ability to use regular editors has been crippled ever since. :) I don't think vim's ascendance is as recent as you think. Different communities might have been infected at different times. When I started working at Amazon almost five years ago, every engineer on my team was already a veteran vim user (as was I). And of course, vi has been a popular choice for Unix hackers for over 30 years. Maybe what's happening is that Unix tools in general are enjoying an uptick thanks to steadily growing use of Linux and Mac OS X.