I have had trees grow back from being cut down to their roots, to a flat stump on the ground. New shoots can come up around the perimeter of the stump.

Most of the mass of a tree is dead anyway, like our hair or fingernails or outer skin layers. The living part of the tree is like a skin on the outside of a massive, dead wooden structure, with another layer of dead tissue (bark) protecting it.

Vi lets me jump to the place I need to be and make edits to a config file very sticky, simply, and efficiently. But all that came at the cost of the steep learning curve.