That might be a reason to learn the very basics of one or more of the editors available, but this article isn't really about that. It's about people who insist that developers need to learn vim, or emacs, and strongly believe that being familiar with these tools is important. It's developers who feel that their command of vim (or emacs) makes them somehow superior to those who don't, developers who would rather jam modern IDE features into vim than use... modern IDEs.

It's hipster vim, and vim hipsters that I'm calling gatekeepers. I don't have any problems with using vim myself, I'm more comfortable with it than emacs or nano. I kinda like vim.

Having said that, more and more people are moving to cloud-based programming these day, or using servers that support more complex activities over SSH. Even with older tech, I could still configure an FTP client to connect over SSH, work on a file locally in whatever IDE I prefer, then copy it back. Or pretend to be letting me edit it live while doing that behind the scenes.

I would argue that if you're doing a lot of live debugging on a remote server, you're already at a point where you need to reconsider your development and testing practices. Along those same lines, I would repeat my previous sentiment that if you're barely spending time fiddling with files via remote connections, it's good enough to be able to pull up a cheat sheet and figure things out on the go.