Sublime has the same sort of command line tool as TextMate. It's called "subl."
It doesn't work out of the box though. Have to run this:
ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" ~/bin/subl
You can learn enough VIM to make quick server edits in about 5 minutes. I know about a half dozen VIM commands and that's enough for me to edit files on servers pretty much every day.
- Arrow keys - i - esc - o - shift g - cw - / - :x - :q!
Done and done.
Don't use an old serial terminal? Well, you might actually get stuck only having serial console access to a physical machine in a datacenter. Maybe you're trying to fix a mean bug in production and everything is exploded and you are using some person's laptop which for some reason has a horrible terminal configuration.
I haven't used hjkl to move in years, btw. That's vi. Vim lets you use arrow keys - it's VI iMproved. ;)
This sort of nonsense rambling not only leads to serious generational knowledge gaps, which leads to people using utter shit like pico/nano, which I would fire someone for doing.
It also ignores the fact that TextMate is totally awesome and has something Sublime Text doesn't seem to : a command-line tool for opening files from the shell.