In college, my advisor/boss was basically the emacs guy, so I picked up enough to do some basic text editing but didn’t go further because I didn’t feel like spending hours reading man pages.

Later I worked at a place where a shared computer only had vi, so same story. I learned about a half dozen commands and left it with that.

Then I went though a series of other editors and IDEs at different jobs, Notepad++, StyledEdit, CodeWarrior, CodeComposer, some weird proprietary Netbeans based thing, VS Code, etc. I still used vi for minor config editing on the occasional remote machine.

Then I got a job where I would be doing a ton of work on headless remotes, so I decided to get serious about learning something purely terminal based. I tried a couple of things, but ended up with Helix because:

1. it runs pretty great on my 15 year old laptop
2. the vi commands I remembered worked
3. it has actual command discoverability out of the box
4. I didn’t have to install 153 plugins and write a 2834 line config file to make it useful

Now I’m all helix all the time and really enjoying it.