I often use vim despite knowing only a few basic commands because I'm already running various commands on the remote machine in the terminal and don't want the context switch. And because connection / file path completion in TRAMP is annoyingly slow if the server is far enough.

As an extreme example, today I needed to combine parts of two files into one and decided that

  cat foo bar > foobar && mv foobar bar && vim bar

of all things will better keep me in the flow than either googling how to insert one file into another in vim or starting up TRAMP.

Yes, I can use TRAMP but as I ssh to the server anyway to run commands, I'm editing the files with vi there. Furthermore I'm sure I don't inadvertently edit the local version of the file instead of the remote one, or that I forget to kill the buffer with the remote file and edit it instead of the local one after a few days. What's on the server stays on the server.

Never really learned emacs so didn't know TRAMP existed. When was it created? I was given that advice ("vi will always be available on the server") in the late 90's so I'm curious to know if TRAMP was an option my prof didn't know about (or didn't mention), or whether it was developed later and the advice was good at the time.

EDIT: Found http://www.fifi.org/doc/tramp/tramp-emacs.html which mentions that TRAMP started development in November 1998. I would have been getting that advice in late 1997 or early 1998, given when I started my Unix class at college. So the answer appears to be that the advice was actually correct at the time, but superseded sooner than I thought it was.