Vim (or emacs, or any other advanced text editor) is much easier to use than nano when you need to do something more complex than type couple of lines.
Sometimes you don't even have the luxury of nano. Any moderately advanced Linux user should probably learn the basics of vi. Just knowing how to insert text and save it can fix a system that's stuck in recovery. Even if it's just to add a comment in front of a line in a config file.
In every post of this kind I am amazed at so many people using nano instead of micro which is SO MUCH BETTER while being the same thing at the same time.
Nano isn't even that simple. Ctrl+X to quit? I guess if you use phonetic sounds to figure out how to exit a program. At least Vim uses the idea of "use what the words start with."
I personally use micro in the terminal, and Kate if I want a GUI to write. Vim and Emacs are fine for those who want it, I have no stakes in the editor wars beyond "I just want my program to do what I want, and I want it to be simple to learn."
Isn't this supposed to be VIM vs Emac? What's is there point to be programming in the terminal anyway? Nano is good to fix some config files while your are in there, but if I needed to do real programming I'll be finding something that works in the GUI.
Easy is relative. What are you trying to do? Replace a value in an yaml file? Then nano is easier. Trying to refactor a business critical perl/brainfuck polyglot script in production? Then you probably want to use vim (or emacs if you are one of those people)
Ugh, I swear vi and it's derivatives are the absolute worse text editors going. There may have been reasons thirty or forty years ago, but now it's just complexity and a weird ui for the sake of it
The problem I had with nano is that, for the time being, it was supposed to be easy to use. With that in account I always get lost when saving a file and closing the thing because one's used to doing something else with Ctrl+O and Ctrl+X.
Whereas with Vim (and Neovim for a little while, and now with Vis) I knew it had a steep learning curve from the start so I always had it in mind. And all the funny stories about quitting vim.
Worst is when installing a new distro(usually in a vm ) and it defaults to nano and for some weird reason no vi of any sort is installed. I hated nano. Last time I intentionally used something like nano was the 90s with pine I think.
The first time I found myself in nano was when testing a distro fifteenor twenty years ago. I had to edit some files and it was the only available editor. The damn thing was a horror to use. I still have no idea who it caters to. I haven't had to use it since though.
I spent the weekend failing to make my civ mods work, with a thousand lines of notes.. 2/3 in, I think "damnit blazeknave. You spend months perfecting this stupid fucking obsidian setup, and you've been here in notepad+ like a fucking jabroni."
Greybeard here. I can use vi, emacs, nano, etc. and use whatever is available if it suits the job. For many years I did dev in emacs on my computers and on other systems used vi for quick edits. Currently on my own laptop I have micro as default term editor now. For Rust development - code, though I have hopes for Lapce.
They're all just tools and so are people who get tribal about things.
My problem with those are that I always manage to get lost on where the program has its focus/what kind of instruction is expecting.
And while trying to go back to normal I end up messing it more and more.
Maybe some day I will get there, but it is still not the day.