Comment by PaulHoule

When I got my first Unix account [1] I was in a Gnu emacs culture and used emacs from 1989 to 2005 or so. I made the decision to switch to vi for three reasons: (1) less clash with a culture where I mostly use GUI editors that use ^S for something very different than what emacs does, (2) vim doesn't put in continuation characters that break cut-and-paste, (3) often I would help somebody out with a busted machine where emacs wasn't installed, the package database was corrupted, etc and being able to count on an editor that is already installed to resolve any emergency is helpful.

[1] Not like the time one of my friends "wardialed" every number in my local calling area and posted the list to a BBS and I found that some of them could be logged into with "uucp/uucp" and the like. I think Bell security knew he rang everybody's phone in the area but decided to let billing handle the problem because his parents had measured service.