[chjohasbrouck]

This is why no matter how much sense it makes to use something like vim or emacs as your primary development editor, I could never justify the amount of time it would take me to actually be totally comfortable and start seeing benefits (beyond just using it for small quick edits at the command line).

Typing speed is never the bottleneck. You could double most developers' typing speed when they code and it'd probably have a negligible impact on their overall productivity.

There are benefits, but do they really outweigh the benefits of those same hours spent studying a data structure or design pattern or trying new tech?

[dasil003]

If you don't think vim or emacs is worth it then fine, but you're setting up a strange false equivalency between learning new concepts and learning new tools. The fact is, you can't program without tools, and practice will make you better with the ones you choose. If you only ever learn new patterns and algorithms and just type your code into Notepad then you will be handicapped as a working developer.

Personally I choose vim for the exact reason you choose not to: that is I want the ability to edit files in any language on any system I touch with maximum efficiency. This accelerates my ability to try new languages because I don't need to rely on language-specific tooling. Also, vim has more longevity than many design patterns which are susceptible to obsolescence by new language features, and new languages themselves which have a half-life proportional to their age.

[dman]

I agree this things like typing speed and a good editor should not matter but in reality I think it does. I think the state of programming flow is very hard to get into, and very easy to fall out of. In fact the easiest way I find myself getting out of state of flow is if I find myself doing something mundane. Anything that allows you to do more while you are in the flow, or lessens the chance of breaking out of it is valuable in my opinion. Will share an anecdote here - before I started using clang-format for formatting my code, I expected that adopting it would merely save me the time I spent formatting. On the contrary what happened was that it has almost completely changed the way I write code when I am in flow since I now no longer have to worry about having to make it look good. In retrospect I now find that in the past I would often spend crucial parts of my programming flow doing mechanical indentation of code and doing such a mechanical activity was often a ripe target for me to fall out of flow.

My typing speed and accuracy are both pretty low, when and if I correct that, I hope to have a similar efficiency gain as I did when I adopted clang-format since I won't be falling out of flow for mundane things like typos. Not every moment spent programming is equal, and in my humble opinion it really helps to invest in making your "special moments" more productive.

[davvolun]

Wha, what? vim and emacs aren't about typing speed, they're about action speed. 99% of the reason I love using vim is because I can do exactly what I can do with a combination of mouse and keyboard actions, but without leaving the keyboard. And many IDEs have, for example, vim extensions so you can get the best of vim without manually building up your vim environment and extensions (although learning e.g. PyCharm is no different than learning and building my own vim env -- I use both).

[p10_user]

It doesn't take much time to be equally comfortable with vim/emacs as you are with your normal editor. Anything you learn after that is a bonus. It's hard to say how much faster I am using vim than a normal editor, but I'm a hell of a lot more efficient and comfortable doing it.

[wallace_f]

I'm just curious what code editor do you use right now?

[_gjav]

I use the JetBrains family of IDEs (IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, RubyMine, PhpStorm, WebStorm) and I'm really happy with them.

I've also been playing around a bit with Atom lately.