Interesting the history is varied for such a simple tool.

I am but a lowly mouse/GUI user so rarely have to dwell in a shell, but I learnt the basics of vi in my 1st year of university and never forgotten. Gotten me out of many a pickle being able to reliably edit a file quickly.

Simple tool? Visual text editor is probably the most complicated piece of software in coreutils.

there's a visual editor in coreutils? i didn't realize

oh i guess there's GNU Readline, but that's not in coreutils i think

No, you're right. I meant "universally included in Linux distributions".

Neovim supports the mouse by the way.

I'm a GUI user too but using helix-mode (like vim-mode but IMO more intuitive) in my GUI editor, zed, gives me the benefits of both.

...and presumably quit vi once you're done!

I have typed either :wq or ZZ into so many files in VS Code... :-)