At the risk of restarting the Editor wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war) from days of yore, I find it interesting that emacs wasn’t even in your list of contenders. I hear it mentioned less frequently these days, so perhaps it’s going by the wayside?

For the record, I’m a vi/vim user! I had the privilege of being taught to use it by an RFC-writing greybeard decades ago, and have used it without thinking ever since.

For those who find themselves on a machine with only vi/vim, or want to learn, here’s a quick primer when editing a file (usually done by typing “vi foo.txt” in a shell) –

:q! …Force quit vi (:q also works – gentler!)

:wq! …Save file and quit vi

i (then type characters) …insert text at current position

A (then type characters) …Insert at end of current line

G …go to first character of last line in the file

/foo …search for first occurrence of “foo” in the file (hit / again to find additional instances)

x …Delete character under cursor

:56 …Go to line 56

yy …Copy the line the cursor is currently on into the buffer

p … Paste the buffer

r (then type character) …Replace character under cursor

u …undo (hit multiple times to undo prior actions)

When done with a command like this, hit Esc to go back into normal mode.

Second nature after a bit of practice! I used to work with a guy who insisted on using ed. That was… odd.