His reason for why he’s a vi guy was funny! (He only had 60M free for his Linux partition and emacs wouldn’t fit). It did sound mildly apocryphal but so did most of it. My reason for vi is equally random. I learned Unix at college, but I wasn’t allowed on the systems because I wasn’t an engineering student. I had to resort to nefarious means to get online, so I needed to keep a really low profile. The easiest way to…
I didn't come from a rich family. Throughout my whole education, I was on hand-me-down computers. They were predictably low-spec but that's how I learned HTML, JS, and CSS in high school, and then Scheme, Java, PHP, C, et. al. in college.
Add to that the fact that our internet connection isn't great either. Alongside learning how to program, I developed a preference for tools that came out of the box. You didn't have to download them and you can be fairly confident that they are compatible with the hardware specs you got. It's for this reason that I was never fond of IDEs ala Eclipse and NetBeans; when I started messing with Linux, I used GEdit. Eventually I started doing AI stuff and, either by sheer nature of the algorithms themselves or maybe my own programming incompetence (or both), running those algorithms made my already poor computer crawl (I had 2GB of RAM back in 2010-2012, when this story took place). So I started to really try to squeeze more resources out of my machine.
Among the first to go was GEdit. I could not prove this to you scientifically but my reasoning was that if it had to draw a window, it was eating on my resources. So I learned vi, another decent text editor that came out of the box with Ubuntu. I would've gone for nano but I thought, if I'm gonna learn how to use an editor that does not render a window, I might as well go for the one with the more geek points.
Eventually, I started working and got relatively better internet connection. I finally learned the difference between vi and vim so now among the first things I do on a new machine is install vim (although in my bashrc I have alias vi='vim'). Learned a few tricks from my coworkers who used vim and started a dotfiles repo with my own vimrc. I still try to stay minimalist though. I don't install plugins so I bet by most vim users' standards, my set-up is horribly vanilla.