Comment by divbzero

The course is quite opinionated, in a good way:

  It is essential to be able to efficiently use a text editor, and doing
  all your writing / coding / text processing in one of the common editors
  available on all Unix systems is good practice.  vi(1)/vim(1) and emacs(1)
  are popular choices.

My college instructor encouraged the use of emacs in particular. I eventually migrated to vim but appreciated the instructor’s core message that text editor + CLI feels less magical than a full fledged IDE.