VI is the second editor that I learned. The six commands that I use in it will always be dear to me. Twenty-five years have passed, I still use the same six commands. The landscape has changed a lot though: VIM has taken VI into the stratosphere.
My buddy showed me how he uses VIM. It has plugin equivalents that every Emacser would recognize: multiple cursors, regex style file and command completion, modeline, tree browser, code-completion, project defintions, most recently used files, ag integration, jump to character, region expansion, undo history visualization, and kill ring. Even cooler is that he runs it all in Tmux so from my perspective he adds even more to VIM. Even better is the synergy (:P) between VIM and Emacs. All of the features I listed either started in Emacs or VIM and were duplicated. That is great to see the feature cross pollination.
After demonstrating all of these cool features I remarked:
“So—VIM doesn’t stand for VI iMproved any more. Now it stands for VIM Imitates eMacs, cool!”
A cool icy silence filled the work-space.
I ran M-x butterfly and we both smiled as VIM and Emacs converge.
Converge? Light off spacemacs for a great time. The colloidal suspension is upon us!
One of my other buddies switched to Spacemacs. 100% on his own volition—I did not lean a single ounce of Emacs upon him. So glad he started with Spacemacs. He is happy as a clam.