quitting vi is a basic competency test.

would you listen to a doctor that could not suture a cut? how about a mechanic that could not remove a socket from a ratchet?

simple file editing. vi has been around for every. if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?

(personal anecdote: once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..)

I’d been developing with emacs for years before I learned how to quit vi. Just means he’s never had to change the config on a remote server with a barebones setup :-)

It's more of a cheap gotcha than a valid test. If we take somebody like me, I learned to code in IDEA/PyCharm, these days mostly code with either Zed or OpenCode, and occasionally drop into nano and Positron. I wouldn't be able to do anything in Neovim without looking it up simply because I had no reason to learn it. A doctor who learned practices appropriate in the 20th century might now necessarily be hired for knowledge of these practices today.

I'm certainly not listening to someone who thinks vi is used by every developer

> quitting vi is a basic competency test.

no, its pop quiz bullshit. Oh you know about ":wq"? Well done! But if you don't know, you do it a few times and now you know. It does nothing, outside of teaching you a bit about poor UX.

> if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?

using one of the other available ides?

> once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..

That's not a sign of good judgement, that's a sign of being technically fashionable. It's hipster shit, akin to rejecting a candidate because they're a fan of Taylor Swift and don't know who the band Tool are.