In addition to the things everyone else has brought up:
MacPorts gives you everything on any BSD or Linux machine, on your Mac.
iTerm2 is the best terminal on any platform, there's amazing capabilities in it. You didn't know your terminal was so inadequate!
AppleScript, Automator, and every programming language on Mac; Shortcuts, Pythonista, LispPad, & Hotpaw BASIC on iOS; make automation of the system and programming little tools incredibly easy. Everything is accessible to the power user, it's not like Linux where some GUI features are scriptable, and others you'll be writing a C++ program to reach some API because it's not exposed to anything.
As the old ad says (which got me to buy in): Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null
In the good old days, you had to learn assembly/machine language, C, and OS-level programming to get anything done. Even if you mostly worked on applications, you'd drop down and do something useful. At the time, this was writing machine language routines to call from BASIC. This is still a practical skill, for instance I mostly work in Scheme, but use C FFI to hook into native functionality, and debug in lldb.
Computer Science is supposed to be more math than practical, though when I took it we also did low-level graphics (BIOS calls & framebuffers), OS implementation, and other useful skills. These days almost all CS courses are job training, no theory and no implementation.
Younger programmers typically have no experience below the application language (Java, C#, Python, PHP) they work in, and only those with extensive CS degrees will ever see a C compiler. Even a shell, filesystems, and simple toolchains like Make are lost arts.
The MIT Missing Semester covers some of the mid-high levels of that, but there's no real training in the digital logic to OS levels.
The purpose of Air Force is to monitor the skies, project power at a distance, and provide air superiority.
The purpose of Navy is to put a floating fortress off your shore and bombard your cities, carry around materiel, men, and aircraft, and patrol a vast volume of ocean.
So Navy structures fit the mission better, and this has been true since early SF.
It's fine, I use Lagrange to read it sometimes, and there's a few gemlogs I follow. But it's in a weird space of "almost HTML, so why not just do HTML?"
Gopher still works fine, and has more clients (I still use Lynx). I like the clean separation of menus (even if you use a lot of i info lines) and documents. There's a bunch of gopher holes still out here. I haven't updated mine in a couple years, but when/if I move it over to a new server I will, as kind of a back-channel to the site & blog.
I often had to poke around inside Atom to see what it was really doing, what some bug was, and to figure out how to write or configure extensions. I don't as often do that with Vim, but it's pretty clean C.
Do you not look inside the overly complex tools you use, especially beta ones? The whole appeal of "open source"/"free software" etc. is you can read the code. But if it's in something you can't stand, that's a disadvantage.
I liked Atom, performance was tolerable on my overpowered machine, but MS killing it just sent me back to Vim and modernizing my plugins.
Zed positives: Metal rendering. I use a Mac, so one platform's fine. But negatives: Rust, so I can't/won't touch any internals, and I loathe the Rustacean propaganda wing. No extensions yet. Config is another stupid json file.
You know what's great about vimrc? It's easy to put in a few config commands, and then you realize you're working in the scripting language. You don't have to switch to a whole new file format. Thanks, Bram.
I follow a simple diet called "half". I eat a half portion of whatever I'd like. I don't eat any better or worse, just less of it. Did you know a frozen burrito has 300+ calories? Eat one, not two. Portion controls are essential, don't get a tub of ice cream, get a box of little ice creams, and then eat one instead of gobbling two or more. Giant bowl of pasta? Half now, half goes in the fridge for tomorrow, instead of packing my gut full.
I probably cheat enough that I'm getting 2/3 or 3/4 of my full calorie intake, but it's good enough that I've lost 30 lbs in a couple years, I'm not putting it back on, and it's required no real hardship.
John Varley's 8 Worlds books (pre- and post-reboot) have had to colonize the rocks of the Solar system, tho they're not that technical, and he rarely moves past the Moon. Also Gaea (Titan, Wizard, Demon) has an extremely alien habitat; there are other Gaea creatures, just the protagonist one is crazy but also Human-friendly.
Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky is about life on STL, multi-generation starships.
Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix is mostly set in habitats, asteroid mining, and Martian terraforming, but also a very alien hive.
NEVER BORN. “You mean we all came from Earth?” said Nikolai, unbelieving.
“Yes,” the holo said kindly. “The first true settlers in space were born on Earth—produced by sexual means. Of course, hundred of years have passed since then. You are a Shaper. Shapers are never born.”
“Who lives on Earth now?”
“Human beings.”
“Ohhhh,” said Nikolai, his falling tones betraying a rapid loss of interest.
It's clearly secondary to correctness: A program that is well-written but doesn't work right is worthless. Many hairy balls of mud have shipped to great acclaim.
Human readability & comprehension is nice for maintenance, but you don't get to maintain something that never worked right to begin with.
… Of course, Windows is existence proof that you can be successful with neither.
Maybe you've heard of this device that plays music on tiny headphones, great for listening while walking. It was called a Walkman. Came out in 1979. By the time the iPod came out, there were plenty of digital music players; I carried a Rio Volt (CD-ROM full of MP3s), but the Nomad was the one CmdrTaco compared iPod to.
Many people carried Palm Pilots, Newtons, cell phones, pagers, portable games (GameBoy, Game Gear, Lynx), film & digital cameras. I used to carry so many gadgets. Sharp/Tandy PC-3 was a great little calculator/computer, so was HP-35s.
Apple's done an amazing job of making vastly better versions (eventually, in some cases; I waited for gen 3 iPod with USB), and folding multiple things into a device, and competing with themselves. So now most of those devices are gone, and we just carry an iPhone (or lame knockoff). I have a bunch of portable game devices, which live on my desk because why carry them? iPad rolled over the MacBook for portable computing. And now Vision Pro is going to roll over that (in a couple versions, probably).
The "one-hit wonder" assertion just requires someone to have lived a cave since 2006.
They've only (in this century) produced a new product people take with them once, iPod. Except for the iPhone. MacBook Air. iPad. Apple Watch. AirPods.
Filters - basic functions like sort, up to your own scripts.
Build/send to REPL.
ed doesn't have highlighting, but it's perfectly useful. Notepad's basically useless, you can't highlight or filter, can't build. Vim does 1-3, and then you just type :!make or whatever.
Captain James T. Kirk : All right. It's instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes. Knowing that we won't kill today. Contact Vendikar. I think you'll find that they're just as terrified, appalled, horrified as you are, that they'll do anything to avoid the alternative I've given you. Peace or utter destruction. It's up to you.
In addition to the things everyone else has brought up:
As the old ad says (which got me to buy in): Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null