It's incredible how good of a design Vi is. Try this experiment: Busybox includes a tiny clone of vi with a reduced feature set. It's very stripped down when compared to Vim or even other vi clones, but as a pure text editor it's still more powerful than most modern day IDEs . I love my Jetbrains IDEs, but you can take my Vim plugin from my cold dead hands :)
I would say it’s incredible to see the quality and “durability” of Linux/Unix tools. The other day I wondered “how old is grep”, looked it up and realized that I use a piece of software that’s over 50 years old on a daily basis. The fact that these tools have stood the extreme test of time is really something.
Another person in the lab came over, invited me to his machine and showed me LaTeX in Emacs. We became friends (he a mathematician, I a zoologist). I bought beer; he brought 'computer wisdom'. Thirty-odd years later, those files are still perfectly reproducible. All of my kid's school reports from elementary onwards... LaTeX.
It's hard to overstress how important is longevity in a toolset.
Side rant on Emacs' keybinds: with orderless and vertico (and marginalia and whichkey) it is almost as fast for me to `M-x dir` as to `C-x d`, and in both cases I get a dired buffer. Aaand, `dired` is magic. History also tells me that it is older than Emacs.
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