[Spoke]

In my opinion vi is the way to go. The advantage is portability because you basically have to carry nothing around. Everything remains in the server making things much easier, you have a single configuration that you like and use it from wherever you log in. The fact that is text based makes is a practical choice even in places where you have a poor internet connection. There are a few graphical interfaces for vi too, so it does not mean that the two things are mutually exclusive, but as a rule of thumb, if you have a key-stroke to perform an action that you need to repeat often, it is usually more efficient than using a mouse, plus, the requirement of a pointing device for anything is a hassle when you are dealing with mobile devices (you may also navigate vi's help and menus with a mouse if you so configure it by the way).

Though a bit off-topic, this is the same reason I stopped using zMud and other windows based mud clients. It was horrible to have to depend on being able to run or install a piece of software wherever I went and having to carry around my character files, and then having to update them as I got home so I knew I had the latest version up etc etc. Now when I play, I just keep a copy of tintin running in my linux box, connect to it through ssh and voila, everything is there, and once again, because it is only text, you can make it work wherever you are.

With respect to whomever mentioned 'I can do the key-typing too' in Menu based editors, well, if you know a key-stroke sequence for performing such tasks then I do not understand your objection to vi ("I spent plenty of time learning vi keystrokes at my last job, and ultimately you're just memorizing things that other editors have on menus.") since you are doing it with your Menu based editor anyway.

Lastly, I believe the choice of editor goes along with the mental disposition of the user. Some people feel more comfortable with Menus and a friendly graphical atmosphere and are thus more efficient working in such an environment. Other people may thrive in environments where they have more control on the subtleties of editing and being able to do arbitrary thing, and so they devote more time to learning to just do so and work effectively in this kind of environment. For me, as a physics student the clearest way to explain it is comparing typing papers in LaTeX vs typing them in MS Word. Yes, you can get everything to look the way you want in MS Word, eventually, and you can have a publish-worthy paper typed and formatted on MS Word, but once you learn the tricks and commands on LaTeX (not entirely intuitive) you realize that finishing a publication worthy paper with tons of equations and graphs on it takes about 1/5 th of the time in LaTeX.

Anyway </2 Cents>