Actually, vim is a cross-platform editor.

You can use it on Linux, MacOS, and Windows (among many other operating systems).

vi is even more ubiquitous. Even if one doesn't use vim as one's primary editor, it would behoove one to learn the basics of vi, as it's available on virtually every operating system.

> Vim is a Linux/Unix text editor used via the terminal.

Vim in specific actually has a rather nice GUI called gVim. It's what I used when I used vi-style editors, which overlaps with the last time I used Windows seriously. So, yeah, gVim works on Windows and has for well over a decade now.

I know Vim well enough to use it for this kind of thing but, IMO, if you find yourself doing a lot of hot edits on live servers you're doing it wrong.

Almost all of the editing I do is in a consistent environment on my development machine and I don't see the point of using a lowest-common-denominator tool when I don't have to. I'm sure with some work you can bend Vim into something approaching the power of an IDE but why would you bother? Text editing is a pretty small part of the work of development, after all.

Text editing is certainly a small part of development, but if you're in a dev role where your job involves writing a lot of code, you actually are spending a lot of time in editing mode. I spend quite a lot of time in Vim now because I'm doing a lot of programming, and that's why it's worth spending the time to both learn Vim and configure it to taste. Most of the time what I need to get the job done is a great text editor, and Vim scratches that itch. If, for instance, I was doing massive code refactoring instead I can see why an IDE would be the right tool to use.

> When you are SSH'ed into your server and you need to adjust a configuration file

This is pretty much exactly what you're not supposed to do in any form of modern system administration. How would you rebuild that server, or move it to a different provider?

Edit a local definition of your server for Ansible or Salt or Puppet or whatever else, and let those systems deal with making the server match your definition.

this heavily depends on the scale of the server of course. not everyone has clusters. your VPS that hosts your blog is an example of something where Salt or Puppet would be WAY overkill.

> your VPS that hosts your blog is an example of something where Salt or Puppet would be WAY overkill.

I've used Salt for this in the past - it's not overkill, and it's good practice. Ansible is even more lightweight. You can set up a blog, an IRC bouncer, and whatever else, in practically no time. Then, when you inevitably mess it up, you can wipe it and have it running again in 10 minutes.

(At the moment, I use CoreOS on my server, so my configuration is just a bunch of Dockerfiles and fleetd unit files that I can edit locally.)

Almost any sane programmer editor/IDE allows for remote editing.

That's not comparable, when the file you want to edit is only writable by root and you have to go through a jumphost to get there.

Ok, that is actually case where text editors are better.