I think it’s worth learning vim, or emacs shortcuts, as an intellectual exercise.
I still save time by editing little code thanks to vim, or vim mode in my ide. And it doesn’t take that long to know the basics. Is it worth it in terms of seconds saved over a career? Perhaps not anymore.
You'll need to edit files sometimes, and Vim (or Vi) is usually present. I don't think I've seen an install without it.
The basics (opening files, writing, and closing) can be learnt in an hour. It's enough to make simple changes to .conf files.
Your assumption is incorrect, even in this forum, which is one of the most pro-AI places you'll find on the internet.
If you think vim is fun (it is), you have my permission to learn it. It's also OK to do things without first asking for social validation.
On the off-chance that you somehow encounter a real world situation where you have to log into a POSIX machine that has no other editors (nano, etc.), you can just learn it then.
I mean you're not defusing a bomb - it's not like you couldn't pull up the shortcut list on your phone and get acquainted with the majority of what you need in a few minutes.
> boost my ego & assert my dominance
FWIW, I think it's one of the last areas of the software world that gives me true joy. I would suggest to give a try for simple that reason.
Purposefully ignoring the second part.
First, what really matters is the vi part of vim, i.e the idea of commands, text objects, motions,... The rest are very useful features that are nice to have especially in a programming context (quickfix list, makeprg, window and buffer management, macros,...).
The first part makes editing text so much easier. Even in the day of prompting, they're still useful to have in any text editor. It takes typing text from a chore to a fun activity.
While vim produces efficiencies for developers, that's not the single highest goal in programming.
If you ask this question, I believe you also fell for this narrative.
Learn it, if it intrigues you. But don't feel bad if you don't have any motivation to do so.
1. The LLMs are down, and you're on call and you need to fix a bug immediately (no mistakes)
2. You're working over serial (The LLMs aren't there to help you and only vi and emacs are available)
3. You're working on an old computer for some esoteric reason.
4. You're going in an interview and they (temporarily) forbid you to use an LLM to check your knowledge on using these tools (as well as programming tests)
If you cannot use these editors without an LLM, (Vim has navigation keys 'hjkl', G/g and so forth which many such tools have adopted), then it isn't a good look.
You don't have to 100% master them but knowledge of them will help when the LLMs have an outage, and there WILL be outages.
Also be careful not to keep relying on these LLMs too much otherwise your programming skills will atrophy. [1]
So the answer is YES, learn Vim, not to boost your ego, but make it a muscle memory so your skills won't atrophy.
[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/4125231/ai-use-may-speed-c...