I know it's the old cliche, but I love emacs largely for that reason. When I'm ssh'ed into one of my boxen, I can do a simple scp and have all my configs for IRC, eww, org-mode, EmacsWget, my custom scripts, etc, everything in one place and managed under one system ecosystem, and from a terminal without having to touch/forward X. The longer I spend in it the less convoluted simple text editing becomes, I just think there is a high barrier to entry that is daunting even for command line jockeys.
I still vi/vim everyday too though, mostly because some things, like embedded stuff I work on, emacs would be too much, so it's very much situational.