haha, indeed I was quite late to the party in discovering the power of these tools :) In a way though, the fact that a college student in 2016 can get excited about the possibilities of vi and make speak volumes to how influential a well-designed software tool can be!
Well if you take suggestions, I personally only use vi over slow links (it shines on high latency connections where a normal editor does your head in with the slooow updates).
Since you're mentioning the arm gcc you probably have access to the likes of jed, nano or even the editor built into mc there.
