An acquired taste

These days retro-minimalism in desktop computing has become quite fashionable. People play old console classics, use minimalistic tiling window managers and many people go back to using text editors that their parents already grew up with.
I have always found this trend a bit weird, especially with respect to text editors. Why on earth should I throw 20 years of CUA, a mousable gui and the convenience of not having to constantly switch between different modes overboard and start to use vi?
I myself learned to program with QuickBasic. Although Windows (I think some version 2.0 or 3.0) *was* running on my computer I did not use it since it was notoriously unstable and stole away precious RAM from my individual-based simulations (yes, this is what I did when I was 16...). Also the DOS IDE QuickBasic came with was actually quite nice. The built-in editor implemented a standard CUA interface, therefore that is what I became used to.
I was accordingly shocked when I started university and had to learn vi. Horrible non-intuitive key bindings, a modal interface, no menus - I was disgusted. Out of necessity I learned enough vi to get along (we weren't even allowed to use X terminals for the first two years), but I never liked it. At home I continued to use QuickBasic and QuickC, or, when I started to switch to DJGPP (it allowed programming for protected mode which meant I could use the whole *8MB* of RAM without jumping through hoops) I just went with the simple DOS edit command and later with rhide.
Later, after switching to Linux I luckily stumbled upon NEdit. NEdit actually made me happy - it was fast, featureful and extremely configurable and scriptable. Unfortunately - being based on Motif - NEdit was also firmly rooted in the ancient past of Unix UI technology. Since there also was no sign of ongoing development I finally with great regret abandoned it (together with WindowMaker and my iBook) a couple of years ago.
Since then I have tried all CUA editors and IDEs I could get a hold on but none of them really satisfied me. Having replaced my iBook with a MacBook I decided to try OS X for a while, which didn't make the text editor situation any easier. I didn't manage to warm up to XCode and Smultron although nice felt a bit too locked in (just in case I wanted to ditch OS X again) therefore I stuck for a while with jEdit. After my annoyance with OS X and my MacBook had grown strong enough to go back to Linux (on a nice Lenovo R61) I decided to give kate and kwrite a try, which I have used since then.
A couple of weeks ago after having encountered another weird annoying bug in kwrite and an extensive round of checking on all linux text editors I know of I finally had enough. I decided to give vi a second chance.
And to my own utter surprise this time around I actually liked it. Vim really excels at configurability, speed, syntax highlighting and multi-window editing (due to its bugginess a constant pain in kate). On the other hand I didn't find it difficult at all to memorize the odd key combinations (though having a cheat sheet pasted to the wall doesn't hurt) and somehow they just didn't feel nearly as unintuitive as during previous encounters. Even the constant switching between insert and command mode which has always been my biggest issue with vi hasn't started to annoy me yet.
I could imagine that it's an age thing. It took me nearly 30 years to start to like olives, capers and anchovy and now I love them (visiting Sicily helped...).
Maybe vi really is an acquired taste and I just needed to pass the 35 to finally learn to appreciate it.


P.S.: While ditching kate/kwrite I also changed (back) to E17 and modified all color schemes to bright on dark. Could be that I'm just following fashion after all...