Look, some of us old farts started on Linux back before nano was included by default, and your options for text editing on the command line were either:
vi/vim, a perfectly competent text editor with arcane and unintuitive key combos for commands
emacs, a ludicrously overcomplicated kitchen-sink program that had reasonable text-editing functionality wedged in between the universal woodchuck remote control and the birdcall translation system
Given those options, most of us chose to learn how to key-chord our way around vim, and old habits die hard.
I refuse to see how vim and emacs is worth learning. I only use it because that's the only option when editing server files. Beyond this, I couldn't imagine coding in these environments from scratch.
Honestly if you don't use vim motions in your ide of choice, you're missing out big time. Being able to do things like "Delete everything inside these parentheses". di( or "wrap this line and the two lines below in a pair of {}" ys2j{ , or "swap this parameter with the next one" cxia]a. with a single shortcut is game changing.
Even just being able to repeat an action a number of times is ridiculously useful. I use relative line numbers, so I can see how many lines away a target is and just go "I need to move down 17 lines" and hit 17j.
Absolutely insane how much quicker it is too do stuff with vim motions than ctrl-shift-arrows and the like.
Honestly those things just don't sound like common enough actions to be worth shaving 0.5 seconds off. How often do you know exactly how many lines to move a line by? And how often do you even need to move a line that far?
Yes I understood that. My point is how often do you know you need to move a line exactly 17 lines? Do you count them? Clearly much slower than doing it interactively by holding down ctrl-shift-down for a bit.
By the way, for editing server files consider nano. It's also widely available, has simpler shortcuts and displays them on the screen. It's obviously not powerful like vim, but a good match when you just need to edit a config file.
I only use it because that’s the only option when editing server files.
suggestion 1: use nano. Unlike vi(m) and emacs, it's meant for humans, all the command shortcuts you can execute are listed at the bottom.
suggestion 2: browse the servers in question via your file explorer (sftp://user@server or just sftp://server) of choice or WinSCP if you're on windows, open whatever file with your local graphical text editor of choice.
As someone who's been a software developer for over a decade and in IT even longer, I still don't use vi/vim for anything other than when crontabs have it set as the editor.
