Ubiquitous

It's available on any Unix box, so you can just ssh into the box and start working. With little configuration, you'll feel right at home.

Fast

Its performance on large file (100+ MB) is ridiculously amazing. And yes, Performance is a Feature.

Reliable

Vim is 29 year olds and actively maintained. Its predecessor, Vi, is more than 45 years old. There's also many successors, most notably is the Neovim fork with even more features and optimizations. You can safely assume that Vim is still there for 50 more years.

Text Editing Language

As you use it you begin to think in it. Vim is set up to function like a language, complete with nouns, verbs, and adverbs. Once you learn the language, you will see there's no better way to edit text. The side-effect is you'll stuck with it, no way to exit.

1988

Vim 1.0 Vi IMitation on the Amiga.

1991 Nov 2

Vim 1.14: First release (on Fred Fish disk #591).

1992

Vim 1.22: Port to Unix. Vim now competes with Vi.

1994 Aug 12

Vim 3.0: Support for multiple buffers and windows.

1996 May 29

Vim 4.0: Graphical User Interface.

1998 Feb 19

Vim 5.0: Syntax coloring/highlighting.

2001 Sep 26

Vim 6.0: Folding, plugins, vertical split.

2006 May 8

Vim 7.0: Spell check, omni completion, undo branches, tabs.

2015 Nov 2

The Neovim fork released v0.1.0 with many enhancement, arguably help boost the original Vim development.

2016 Sep 12

Vim 8.0: Jobs, async I/O, native packages.

Truly a great story! It doesn't teach you anything about using Vim. It, however, gives you a sense of how it feels once your master Vim.

See how other people customize their Vim. However, don't blindly copy their config and then struggle to use it.

A fantastic answer for the question "What is your most productive shortcut with Vim?". This changes me from "memorize all the shortcuts" to "understand Vim".

Must read if you're serious about learning Vim. It might be daunting at first consider the total content is equivalent to a 11MB PDF with 4197 pages, but, trust me, they are worths studying. The more I read them, the more I appeciate the effort behind those amazing documentation. Sadly, not many softwares nowaday can match such quality.

Great book. It's easier to follow than the help files and cover many topics that will be helpful for day to day work with Vim.

A PDF reader with Vim key-binding. Sadly, it's Linux only.

A terminal multiplexer, which enables a number of terminals to be created, accessed, and controlled from a single screen, both locally and remotely.

A VIM-inspired file-manager for the console, with tons of helpful extensions.

A text-based web browser as well as a pager like less, very helpful when you mess up your X, can't start any window manager, thus, can't run Firefox to look up for the fix. BTW, try viewing this site in w3m.

Vim emulation plugin for IDEs based on the IntelliJ Platform. No matter how hard you try, Vim is not an IDE. Right now (2021), the best IDEs are Jetbrains', and the best Vim emulation are IdeaVim.