> To me the kinds of people using these editors are the kinds of people that love making everything more complex to seem smart.

If your instinct is to be denigrate people who do things differently than you, you will never understand them. However, you get the advantage of feeling superior.

Let me say why I continue using vi. I started using vi in the early 80s, then moved to vim in the mid 90s. Even people who aren't as old at me have more than a decade of using vi/vim/nvi. Those commands that seem like a burden to remember are completely transparent to me -- that is, I don't need to think about what keystroke to hit to achieve my ends. Why should I climb another learning curve?

If you tell me to just download a vi mode for vscode, I can tell you that the basic motions work, but that last 10% cause unending grief. It is like eating pasta where every 10th noodle is actually a rock disguised to look like a noodle -- completely disruptive.

I can edit quickly when I don't need to move my hands off the keyboard. Likely your dominant hand is flopping back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard when using your gui-centric editor.

> I never understood the appeal of these command-line editors with a million commands for different edge-cases. Why not just use VSCode? It has every possible extension you already need

I'd prefer to have a few dozen composable verbs and nouns than having to research and download "a million" extensions for the edge cases.

> No need to type commands just to edit text when there's a file manager

I have no idea what you mean by this. How does a file manager edit your text?

> It has remote SSH and features for vm machines

You can do that from vim as well. vim/nvi has a plugin ecosystem too. My own philosophy is to use as few of them as I can: one (the 'matchit' feature which ships with the editor).

The final thing you are missing is that nobody uses all the commands -- they find the ones that work for them and they use them without further thought once it becomes muscle memory. If the need ever arises to learn a new command or setting, I'll get around to it when the time comes. If I learn a bunch of things and don't use them, they get quickly forgotten anyway.