The main things i learnt from vim are Escape :q and ^Z. Not a dig on vim, but it was quite a learning curve at the time when nano has been good enough for just about everything i do day to day.
Back in the early 2000s I met some guy who had once sold a copy of edit.exe to some store as if it were some software he had written for managing orders and inventory. The folks at the store used windows, but they would open up edit.exe and it looked just like the stuff that the larger store chains used to manage their own orders... The guy just made a sample file and instructed them how to input data in a specific format that made it all look like a table, but it was just a text file with no validation of any kind.
Nah. I was so annoyed by how primitive editors are that I started writing my own one, that would allow me to seamlessly traverse the AST of the code, rather than being stuck on the low abstraction levels of characters, words and paragraphs. After a bunch of misery making tree-sitter work with Haskell, and using it for a while, I stumbled upon Helix. It is pretty much my idea but faster and working well.
I remember using Notepad for a long time for coding in Windows. Then I was introduced to UltraEdit. It was cool, but expensive. Jumped onto NotePad++ and I've been enjoying it lots.
Edlin is a line editor, and the only text editor provided with early versions of IBM PC DOS,[1] MS-DOS and OS/2.[2] Although superseded in MS-DOS 5.0 and later by the full-screen MS-DOS Editor, and by Notepad in Microsoft Windows, it continues to be included in the 32-bit versions of current Microsoft operating systems.
edit: link and explanation of syntax used if anyone is interested. the w (write) and q (quit) commands made it somewhat similar to VI(M).
https://www.computerhope.com/edlin.htm
That tool was only included with Windows XP Professional, and even then, it was a command-line utility—so unless you were specifically looking for it or browsing through the %windir%\system32 directory, you probably wouldn’t have noticed it.
The article I referenced didn’t specify exactly which 32-bit versions it came with or when it was removed—it just mentioned that it was still included in 32-bit Windows after the DOS era. I didn’t write the article myself, so I can’t really speak to its accuracy.
Personally, I used that edline a lot back in the DOS days starting around 1985, until I switched to Notepad in Windows 95 and later to VIM when I moved to Linux after Windows 98. I never really checked for it in newer versions of Windows after that. A quick Google search confirmed it wasn’t included in XP Home, which would explain why you never saw it.
I keep finding new features. Tabs. Hsplit. Plugins. Authentication prompt at save time if it detects that the user you ran it under doesn't have permission to write to that file.
And of course keybinds that make a dang lick of sense.