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One nice point about vi(m) especially is the fact that its available almost everywhere as most unixy installations got one.

And a nice point of text-based programs generally is that they are easy to use over ssh allowing you to access your programming environment everywhere.

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Here's a dumb question: most *nixes come with vi as the text editor, but the shell uses emacs keybindings. Why is that?

(btw, if you learn emacs well enough, you're commandline-fu goes through the roof)

Actually the keybindings can be changed to those of vim (by typing "set -o vi" on terminal). It is probably not set as default as it is confusing to new users.

"the shell" usually means (on modern Linux distros) bash, which is the "GNU Bourne-Again SHell".[0]

Brian Fox[1] developed the readline library to handle bash's interactive input. Between Brian Fox having been an Emacs maintainer, and bash being a GNU project, the keybindings followed suit...

Had bash been "Bill Joy's[2] Awesome SHell," things might have gone differently :-) Well, it would've just been csh[3] (written by Bill Joy.)

[0] I address this introduction to anyone not already "in the know."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Fox

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_shell

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