This useful, but it also seems like a very comparable feature set to editors like Emacs and Vim. So I'd still love to hear from someone who has the background to do a direct comparison, especially if they prefer WordStar.

Vim was never a steep learning curve for me; more of a gentle slope. But then again, I cut my teeth on ed, and when I met sed, it felt like a revelation. On DOS, I even used edlin, a kind of ed junior with training wheels and a sadistic sense of "functional."

You have to understand: my first DOS machine was a Tandy 1000, acquired before I had a driver’s license. It was upgraded over the years and not retired until the grunge was well underway and I had already been married and divorced.

MS-DOS’s edit had WordStar keybindings; Ctrl-S to move back, Ctrl-E to move up, and so on. My dad "brought" home a copy of WordStar from work, and oh, the things that trio, WordStar, me, and a dot matrix printer conspired to create.

Borland carried those keybindings into Turbo Pascal, which I learned in college, having finally escaped the Fortran 77 gulag that was my high school’s TRS-80 Model III/IV lab. The investment into the Apple II lab didn't happen until AFTER they gave me my exit papers at a spring awards ceremony.

Why do I still prefer these tools?

Because they’re what I know. They don’t get in my way. We have history, a better and longer history that I have with my first wife. Those keybinds helped me write my first sorting algorithms, my first papers on circuit design, and the cover letters that got me my first jobs. They’re not just efficient. They’re familiar. They’re home.

I've used all three and I think it's just a matter of what you're used to. I mostly use vi but have no problem switching to the other two schemes when needed. But maybe that's just me not having strong preferences. I know some people who have trouble switching from Chrome to Firefox and those are practically identical.