The very first few years of my career I spent writing code (mostly Perl) in vi (not even vim) on a SPARC running Solaris. I bought myself the O’Riley Perl Cookbook and that was pretty much my sole guide apart from the few internet forums that were available at the time. Search engines were still primitive, so getting help when you got stuck was far more difficult. But it forced me to deeply learn a lot of things - Perl syntax (we had no syntax highlighting, intellisense, etc.) terminal tools, and especially vi keystrokes. Looking back, there was far less distraction and “noise”, though I admit that could have been the fact that it was the beginning of my career and expectations were lower. I miss those times because now everything feels insanely more layered and complex.