Long story short I didn't know what vim was until a year or so ago which really pisses me off. I always wondered about having additional clipboards or making macros, but I didn't know those terms and I never thought to ask.
Am I wasting my time learning this now, as a crusty adult in the face of all this auto completion stuff? Do you guys even use the auto complete? From my PoV, I really can't tell if the amount of text I will need to manually edit will increase or decrease going forward.
I use it a lot for creating little batch tools that make my desktop life easier. Instead of having to do CLI all the time, I can just script a command that pipes 3 or 5 steps and then connect an icon to it. Place it on the desktop and redundant commands are automated. Saves a lot of time if you do a lot of repetitive CLI steps regularly.
You'll also need it or nano editor for bash config file editing (mentioned earlier). I run into that a lot with mining commands.
Twenty years ago I learned some vi fundamentals. My knowledge has not grown at all since then. As of today if I have to edit a file in command line I still prefer to use vim over nano or anything else.
So I guess what I am saying is the 80/20 rule may apply here. If you want to learn to use vim go for it but don't try to become some vim master, I would seriously question that use of time. But learn a few basics sure and then use them. And if you find yourself preferring vim then sure go deeper. It is crazy powerful and can do so much, the question is whether that is needed in 2026, which will probably depend on what you are doing.
For my part I use it to modify config files, so I don't need much from it.
It's also pretty much guaranteed to be on any and every *nix OS you come across.
I just use nano
It depends.
What are you trying to get out of vim fluency?
Always worth knowing
vimif you expect to spend time in the terminal. It's very handy for editing configs on remote machines at the very least.In general, most things developers use today will be around for a long while still. LLMs will make some of it optional, depending on the kind of things you do, but I learned assembly in college, and even though I never used it, I'm happy I did.
The box will get bigger but you can choose whether it's a blackbox or a clear one. One benefit of learning the innards of things is you're not entirely at the mercy of other devs.
The answers will depend on how each person uses it, so here's mine. I use nvim for almost everything on my system, every time I want to modify a file, whether it's a configuration file or any other, or to take notes
absolutely learn it.
I say that as an amateur Emacs user
it's not worth it out of all the other CLI stuff you could learn
if you can mv, mkdir, cp, ffmpeg, curl, rawtherapee-cli, scp, ftp, sftp, ssh etc. you'll be fine with a gui text editor
Thanks for the list. ffmpeg sounds pretty interesting, and I haven't looked into that.
Honestly the older I get, the more I appreciate tools that reduce friction instead of adding more UI layers. Vim starts weird but eventually feels like muscle memory.