My first instinct is to suggest something that already works for what he wants to do. If he's using a Terminal window on a frequent enough basis that he's looking for a solution, it makes more sense to suggest one than to say "Gosh, yeah, that'd be useful, I hope this terminal emulator releases in the next year some time so that you can do what you want to do with that!"
Oh, I wasn't saying that. I was saying why vi key bindings and not the default emacs key bindings? I think they are a bit more intuitive for someone who hasn't used vim before.
