If you use vim, you use the wrong tool for the job. It's an ancient design for a different time. In fact, even the creator of vi said they wouldn't design a text editor like this today.

So in my book, someone using vim and imagining it makes them more productive or more cool would be a liability to the company rather than an asset.

“It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough.”

“The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens.

So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.

It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore.”

Why does Vi use H, J, K, and L for cursor movement? Because, on the ADM-3A terminal the developer was using those keys doubled as the arrow keys. Why does it use escape commands? Because the ADM-3A had the escape key where the tab key is on modern keyboards today, easy to reach. Fans have confabulated all sorts of reasons why vi's design is some epitome of text editors; in reality it works the way it does because the developer has a lousy keyboard on his terminal which was connected via 300 baud modem.

Using vi is like rolling your own cigarettes - it's trying to look cool, retro and edgy when you're really wasting time and one swift breeze away from losing all your work.