I taught Linux Admin courses before I graduated high school, and the first order was learning vim. If you have a mac, 'vimtutor' is available to you.
vim has nothing to do with PhD-level CS or writing compilers and/or lisp interpreters. The Emacs community might fit that stereotype a little more but really not much more.
Vi (vim being 'vi improved') is great because it works on basically any terminal. It works with my iPad's keyboard and with a teletype terminal from the 70s or 80s, as well as a normal PC keyboard. Emacs has similar brags.
The terminal's not going anywhere and if you like keyboard shortcuts, knowing five or ten that will work on any keyboard in existence for an editor that is on most unix systems you'll find has some value.
I was being a smartass, which was uncalled for. Sorry, Angersock!
Also, I do have a mac, so maybe I'll check out vimtutor.
My point is that I'm very new to programming, and it's so much easier for me to load up Sublime Text and start getting work done. At least for now, learning vim would be something that get's in the way of learning/making. It also doesn't seem like the benefits would outweigh the cost.
I started using vim when I had first started to learn to program. I'd say give it a shot if for no other reason than it's an interesting paradigm shift, and can be really effective.
I'd say give Vintage mode on sublime a shot. It does the basic keybindings/motions of vim and will give you an idea of whether or not you might be interested in it. It's also nice because in insert mode it's basically just normal sublime, so you can just switch back to that if you get frustrated.
Are you on linux, osx, windows, or something else?
If you use vim/vintage mode, remap capslock to be escape.
This took me forever to figure out, for whatever reason, but if you're on windows, the easiest thing to do is get autohotkey [1] and write a script with one line:
Capslock::Escape
You can compile that to a portable binary and use it anywhere as well. It's really straight forward.
I also added two keybindings to make Alt+movement to add cursors above and below:
{ "keys": ["alt+k"], "command": "select_lines", "args": {"forward": false} },
{ "keys": ["alt+j"], "command": "select_lines", "args": {"forward": true} },
It doesn't always interact naturally with vintage/vim mode, though, but that was just a personal preference.
vim has nothing to do with PhD-level CS or writing compilers and/or lisp interpreters. The Emacs community might fit that stereotype a little more but really not much more.
Vi (vim being 'vi improved') is great because it works on basically any terminal. It works with my iPad's keyboard and with a teletype terminal from the 70s or 80s, as well as a normal PC keyboard. Emacs has similar brags.
The terminal's not going anywhere and if you like keyboard shortcuts, knowing five or ten that will work on any keyboard in existence for an editor that is on most unix systems you'll find has some value.