It’s because my job involves managing and operating systems that are only accessible through ssh or tty sessions. I spend hours every day in a terminal, on a remote session, frequently editing files for stuff: crontabs, configs, etc.

I learned vi because when I was coming up, university systems only had ed, vi and emacs, with pico on the servers that had pine for email. I learned vi because it was more powerful than pico (and because I couldn’t get the hang of emacs key combos). I read the help files and learned how to use it, because it was foundational.

Every Unix-like system has a variant of vi. Many of my container images don’t, but it’s trivial to install and use anywhere if needed.

It’s just a more powerful tool than nano, and consequently more difficult to use. Which is fine, man. It’s okay for you to use a basic text editor on the rare occasion you have to edit something in a terminal. You don’t have cause to learn how to be productive in an advanced editor, and that’s fine.

For what it’s worth, when I’m writing and testing python, I use VS Code.

See, you’ve realized your blunder, now. Tell us what editor you use in the terminal, ReCursing, the one that is better than vim. We’d love to know.

What’s the superior choice to vim, then?

Stockholm Syndrome was never real, it was made up to explain a situation where hostages recognized an injustice and refused to perpetuate it, so cops called them crazy. So sure, if you call me crazy for my affection for a tool that has served me well for decades, I’ll consider you a cop.

I use VS Code on the desktop nowadays, but vi will always be my editor of choice in a terminal. Many of the reasons it was powerful and ubiquitous 30 years ago are still valid, so it’s still powerful and ubiquitous. And I’ve been using it for thirty years, so why would I switch to a training-wheels editor?

It’s “zed” because Brits know that it came from “zeta,” which has no “d” in it. That’s also why they don’t say “ay bee see dee eee eff jee”, they say “al bed cam del epp dye gam.”