11. Ted Bundy, the most famous serial killer actually helped people on suicide hotlines, doesn’t mean he was a good person. This sounds like an ad hominem to me.

12. This sounds like The Procrustean Fallacy. Viruses are everywhere, doesn’t mean I want to catch one.

13. Uh, no I don’t. Seriously? With this argument, you are saying if you don’t already know vi you should learn it because… Do you already know it? I mean, why do you know it? Because you were forced to learn it.

I never learned vi and I refuse to waste any time learning it because, hey, I don’t need to because there are plenty of other much better options out there and easily available (helping to invalidate #12 above even more).

Quite frankly I don’t care why it was made. What I know is it is massively cumbersome for 99% of what I do and the other 1% can be accomplished with other simpler modern tools. Use a tool because it makes your life better, not because someone had a great reason to create it in the first place.

11. It’s charityware. It’s the only text editor that has built a hospital and an orphanage. If you don’t believe me, start vim and type :help uganda.

12. It’s everywhere. vi-like editors (usually vim) are available on every computer you are likely to use ever. Not only that, but it’s in your shell and your mysql monitor, and your python interpreter. Because the GNU Readline library knows most of the vi’s edit commands. Edit /etc/inputrc and add a line.

set editing-mode vi

and you will be able to recall, edit, and reuse previous commands, correct typos, etc. I do not know why people like GNU Readline’s default Emacs mode.

13. You already know it. Muscle memory. Once you learn to use it how it was designed to be used, its visual edit language becomes the most natural way to use a computer.

And if you don’t know how vi was designed to be used, it will seem cumbersome and clunky and you won’t know why anybody likes it. So it would help if you read about that visual edit language, in Bill Joy’s paper on the subject.

https://docs.freebsd.org/44doc/usd/12.vi/paper.html

The test: to open and manage a file with the number 7^(7^7) (with all its integer digits) written on it. Nano does not crash, but suffers too much to deal with that file. Gedit crashes and makes the computer crash. Vim does not fail. What is more, vim works as well as if the file was one of a simple 100 B text.

OMG, I am dying with laughter here. Very well and accurately said. Vi needs to die.

If editing massively large files it could be helpful but I just use easier tools like sed, awk and grep. And fun? Are you insane? The last thing I want to do is have to spend 6 months learning all the absurd finger acrobatics required to do something as simple as change a typo.

Personally I think all the vi users love it only because they are trying to justify all the time they sank into learning the over-engineered tool and because they like the elitist feeling they get from knowing something massively complex (even though that complexity has no practical value).

Personally I find it sad that this is the best you can do in providing a top 10 reasons to use the tool.