I have nothing against Vi or Emacs, but since I strongly prefer GUI and mouse over terminal I use GUI editors.
When I don't have a GUI available, I use micro, nano, joe.
When I don't have a GUI available, I use micro, nano, joe.
Vim on the other hand never felt like it benefited much from a GUI, or like it had a very good one available. I just use neovim in a terminal.
I'd use any of them in preference to Vim.
But you might find you like Tilde.
Granted, the UI is still TUI, so items like panes, tabs, nerdtree, quickfix, :help windows etc are rendered with characters, but you can drag borders, mouse-select text, click files, focus panes by clicking, scroll-wheel, etc.
If you look at many of the ‘user stories’ in this thread (and others), you see a lot of people using vi/vim not because they decided to try it, but because they had no real choice. Very often it’s the only usable option on a Unix-like machine.
And yet, you don’t see many people bemoaning the choice. Despite being forced to use it, once people are over the fabled learning curve they tend to like it.