I do the bulk of my editing using Vim. Here is the short version of how that came to be.
Many years ago I worked in an I.T. department doing various bits of grunt work, mostly setting up new desktops and laptops. I was curious about the servers that were managed by others in the department, and I got tasked with setting user accounts on our Unix and VMS systems. I recall the VMS system in particular being a rather manual process. Fortunately we had good documentation on the exact steps needed to create new users.
Our Unix sysadmin felt very strongly that anyone doing admin work on those systems needed a basic knowledge of vi. The reason for this was a concern over repairing systems that were in an unusable state, which usually meant booting into single user mode to clean up what ever mess had happened. The combination of a messed up system and single user mode means that several of the tools that you were accustomed to using wouldn’t work.
With a messed up server you could only depend on statically linked binaries to ( hopefully ) work. At the time the cross section of statically linked editors were things like cat, ed, and vi. So vi became the go to option, because the alternatives were worse.
I had to demonstrate to our Unix sysadmin that I had enough vi skills to open a file, edit it, and save it. Not exactly a high bar, but I remember hating it. I’d never used a modal editor before, and I had to learn H, J, K, L for cursor movement ( terminal emulation settings, another thing that used to be surprisingly easy to do wrong ). It drove me crazy, but I did it because I wanted learn more about these systems, and this was my path to getting access.
After that job I went to work at a small I.S.P., where I was logging in and out of FreeBSD, SunOS, and Solaris systems all the time. Being able to use vi to edit files on each of those turned out be very useful. It also matched my work flow, which was usually: open file in vi, make changes, save and exit vi. Get in, make changes, get out. Repeat as needed.
I tried various vi clones and found that Vim matched my expectations of a reasonable vi editor. By the time I left the job at the I.S.P. Vim had become a habit.
Fast forward to today and more often than not you’ll still find me in a terminal window editing files with Vim.