vi[m] is interesting because

- people talk about how rapidly they can perform complex edits with few keystrokes, which is something I most definitely can't do with Geany (a Notepad++ clone that made me wish Notepad++ worked on Linux); and

- it's a standard utility that you can generally expect to be available in some form on literally every UNIX (especially server environments).

So, basically I'm being pragmatic. I'm at the point where I'm wondering about building my own text editor (something I've wondered about for several years, actually), but that immediately introduces a software-installation problem if I want to be able to bring that editor to other machines.

I have a small modicum of knowledge about how to get by in vi, but it's extremely barebones - exiting, copy/pasting (I think the wrong way, heh), not much else.

I definitely could learn significantly more, but I just have a massively hard time fielding the idea of "okay let's play with the text editor for a few hours". Sure, once I was actually doing it I'd probably find it fun, I just can't convince my brain's broken scheduler that it's not actually a waste of time :D

As an aside: I'm wondering about building my own editor because I want something that can jump around text similarly to the Canon Cat and which has syntax highlighting and autoformatting similar to QBasic/QuickBASIC - and I'm frankly petrified by the idea of adopting a text editor that uses Blink for rendering. Blink (aka Chromium) is like Flash meets Java for UI design nowadays, it's almost like crack, and I want to do everything I can to stay as far away as possible from it.

This is not because the systems using it are not well-designed or -built, but because I fundamentally disagree with the philosophy and idea of using a Web rendering engine for tasks like communication or text editing. HTML5/CSS/JS/WASM is the world's biggest Rube Goldberg "safely run arbitrary code from remote servers" in existence; it wreaks enough havoc on the Internet, I don't want it leaking into my desktop too.

My main complaint is the W3C: they produce specifications that are too narrowly scoped and at too frequent a rate for the associated implementations to be operationally cohesive. The code for each feature in isolation might be excellently architected and written, but as a whole the amount of memory and CPU churn undeniably associated with rendering engines is significantly higher than would be found in platform-native (or even cross-platform) solutions.

You can definitely argue "well that's how things are now, the Web will improve as time goes by"; I'd argue that no, things have always been a mess in the Internet community, and nowadays the driving forces are all companies with advertising and/or consumer-consumption interests. This in itself isn't necessarily wrong, but it means that the focus is "is it good enough? okay, ship it" and there's no conservative holding back until what gets released is of extremely high quality.

EDIT: FOUND IT. This was the reference I was looking for about how the Internet's been crazy for years. The link referenced here is from 1998: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684426 (there's more commentary in the article itself - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10682003 - the parent posts to the excerpt I linked were pretty big).