I've used vim for many years now. It is true, learning vim makes it very frustrating when you find yourself having to use another editor. Luckily, vim is pretty much everywhere so those situations are rare.

I find that vim really shines in editing text on touch screens with on-screen keyboards. I can do complicated commands without doing too much typing out digging through menus or using ctrl alt whatever keys.

What devices with on-screen keyboards are you running vim in?

Just my cellphone.

If you think vim is frustrating for a beginner, you have no idea what it feels like to edit text in non-vim for a half-assed vim user. Really, I don’t master vim after >1decade, but that’s not necessary.

Pair programming is a real pain for me when most of my colleagues just don’t use Vim.

irrational indeed :-)

It seems one of these vim tutorials comes up every 6 months or so, and the one thing they're all missing is a convincing explanation of why someone should learn all the esoteric incantations of a 30-year old text editor.

it's nice not having to constantly lift my hand to use the mouse when i'm just looking through files and making small changes. i can keep my hands on the keyboard for up to an hour and get stuff done, so long as the task at hand only requires a command line interface and a text editor.