So what’s so great about vim, everyone keeps talking about it.

power, lightweight, no need for a mouse, unlimited extensibility, ability to write your own configs with scripts inside, etc...

Very fast once you're used to it. You never need to lift your hands off the home row. Extensions for everything, too. Syntax highlighting, tree view, linters, build tools, auto-formatters, ...

Also, it's already installed basically everywhere. Once you get used to it, it's the last editor you'll ever need, anywhere you log into. (Excepting windows boxes, ofc)

@Root
I've never seen a distro with vim preinstalled.
You might think of vi, which is similar but, by far, not the same.

@metamourge Fair point, you are correct.

The exact point where I went from "this is too hard and weird to "oh but that's pretty nice actually" was when I intuitively realized that :12 went to line 12. After that the syntax started making a lot more sense.

Once you start being able to use it for even basic editing it feels really jarring having to use the mouse in other editors.

Getting used to it is problem.

I work over a VPN so I use vim for quick edits even tho it's not my primary editor. I'm sure I would be super productive and hot if I did use it as my primary editor; most of the people senior to me do but it's a mostly-alien environment still. It's not that bad to pick up for basic stuff though, "I" puts you into insert mode which is the most important mode, then you type your shit and either do escape+wq to save it or escape+q! to discard it. I've picked up a couple of other shortcuts since then but I think that's all you really need to start.

Everybody talks about it because nobody knows how to exit it (/s)

Once you choose vim, you'll never use anything else again

Also what's the "/s" thing?

@non-bin actually I did ;)
For some languages an actual ide is just nicer imo

Ooo....I’ll download it today.

@non-bin it means explicit sarcasm, added it to make sure people knew it was a joke :)