Best Vim Intro

If you like Vim's keybinds, use it. Vim has pretty much everything there is to offer in a text editor.

I've been far enough down the Vim rabbit hole to feel the bottom, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The only reason I don't live in [Neo]Vim anymore is that I decided to learn a different keyboard layout, and ended up with some distaste for Vim's normal-mode mnemonic-based keybinds and their associated function names. Because of the way vim is designed, you can't really get far from the default keybinds. If you are willing to live with that fact, Vim is definitely worth learning.

As a sidenote, NeoVim is essentially better than Vim in every way, so specifically: use NeoVim if you like Vim.

Emacs is also very good. Evil-mode is very full-featured, and elisp is nicer than viml. Emacs is also great if you don't want Vim's keybinds. Emacs' documentation and configurability is essentially unmatched, although Vim gets real close.

Vim/Unix/cli is generally what’s used prior to a specific editor being available for a language/topic.

It is as universal as a chainsaw and one of the few “programmmable” editors (sometimes it’s quicker to do a task “manually” in Vim than it is to write a program) ... vim’s native language is “semi-structured text” and it is wickedly powerful when used appropriately.

With the innovation of language servers and language clients, I think Vim is less necessary for “workaday” programmers.

Language-specific editors will give you refactoring, context sensitivity, in-line references, etc, and while Vim can get you there, a GUI will likely be a lot more convenient.

...but when you do need vim, accept no substitutes.

Emacs and vim has existed for 40 years and has been run and used by people that have thought a lot about text editing. I still find it baffling that all the modern hip editors are still playing catch up wrt the pure editing part. Emacs opened my eyes to what I hadn't discovered in the tools I used before because I used most text editors only as glorified notepad.exe. I had to start over to find what text editing should be like, and now I have no reason to switch back.

I'm not a programmer but I use vim a lot. To me the vim keybindings are a portable element of vim. They are very keyboard friendly IMO and for that reason very much worth learning. Now, which editor you want to go with is another matter. Go with vim, vi, emacs, neovim, VSCode, PyCharm, Sublime (in no intelligible order) but I truly believe the vi keybindins are a huge benefit for someone who can touch type. I love both vim and emacs. I am a civil engineer.

PyCharm (and all JetBrains IDEs) have the IdeaVim plugin available. It does an excellent job implementing all basic vim functionality, and only stumbles on the more obscure stuff that a small percentage of vim users are likely to miss.