Vim is indispensable when working in the terminal. It offers an enormous depth and will make you feel like a text-editing ninja — if you invest the time in mastering it.

Its really great and simple tool for people who uses linux a lot and are good with remembering shortcuts as you don't have UI buttons in vim. It is a really useful editor. Best thing about using VIM is that it comes preinstalled on most of os so you don't need to install anything.

Love it or hate it, there really is no middle ground with Vim. It has a very steep learning curve and really relies of constant and dedicated use to become proficient in it. The point of Vim is to provide a text editor that minimizes the amount of movement your hands have to do so that you can work faster. And speed is Vim's strongest feature, once you get used to it. Vim is also extendable and has a HUGE amount of available plugins that can customize your vim to function just as well as your full featured IDE like Eclipse or Sublime Text. The amount of configuration is staggering and there's even a port of Eclipse that can be used within Vim (called Eclim). Vim is free and can be used in pretty much any Linux distro, so is essential if you want to ssh into remote environments.