Kris Brandow has a (very) short video—I think it’s part of a podcast—advancing the idea that you should learn Vim or Emacs. Irreal, of course, is not going to argue with that but I wish he’d given more reasons why you should. What he does say is that you’ll discover you can be more productive with Vim or Emacs than you can with an IDE but doesn’t explain why that is. You should, he says, just try them.
One of the other people on the video objected that you don’t “just try” Emacs. It’s a commitment that takes dedication and effort to learn. That is certainly true of Emacs as we all know but it’s true of Vim as well. It’s not as hard to master as Emacs but there’s a surprising amount to know before you can consider yourself to have mastered it. That’s the problem with saying, “Just try it.” You won’t see real benefits from either editor until you’ve put a some time and effort into learning them.
The most depressing thing about the video is that Brandow described his suggestion as an “unpopular opinion”. I suppose that it might be unpopular among a certain segment of our community but there are also those who think that Javascript is a great, well thought out programming language. Ours is nothing if not a vibrant community with a diversity of opinion.