[ndh2]

I've always been wondering if there is some secret that I've been missing and that these VIM or Emacs gurus keep to themselves which makes them "more productive".

All these abstract claims in blog posts and on forum pages about productivity are completely worthless. Go watch a stream where you can actually see someone program. Maybe you'll pick something up that they do better/faster/more elegant than you. Other than that, the best advice is to ignore these kinds of topics.

[bakul]

I don't know about being more productive but I use commands like 3cwfoo<esc> to replace the next three words with foo. Or 2cf,foo<esc> to replace everything including the second comma on the current line. Or some : command. I no longer even consciously think about such things as how vi works is something I know in my fingers. Originally I learned such things only after repeating some command multiple times, thinking there has to be a better way, and then learning the more powerful commands. The core set of vi commands is quite regular and once you learn something it can be applied in other situations.

If I am working with another expert vi user it is very easy to give him precise instructions - I can just say things like replace the second foo with bar on every line starting with a space and he'd know to type the correct : incantation.

The key is to pay attention to your inner voice saying "there has to be a better way" and doing something about it! Bottom line: learn to know how to use your everyday tools well.

[btschaegg]

I also was rather sceptical wrt Vim at first; the only reason I ever started using it was that I needed a text editor that compiled for ARM architectures (I wanted to use it in a chroot on my chromebook). After a couple of hours the distrust got to "hm, this might not be too bad". After a couple of days I switched my ZSH to Vim bindings. Now I even use pentadactyl/qutebrowser for browsing the web.

The whole "Vim gives me amazing productivity" thing seems to be a personality trait: People telling you this are much more positive wrt tooling than I am. My basic gist is more like "why the hell can't I do X with this tool". I only started recognizing Vim's worth after getting more and more frustrated at other tools because they seemed to slow me down. Funny enough, I had the exact same experience a couple of years earlier after I got reasonably accustomed with Linux and Bash/ZSH. Learning them was more or less "meh", but coming back to Windows is a nightmare for me now. You have to do everything via the mouse, and the terminal seems almost unusable for me - it's not that I am amazed at how great my tools are (which, to be fair, they actually are), but I get very angry at any tool that doesn't at least do a decent job.

Luckily for me, this effect only seems to affect my experience with tools. I still can get very excited about APIs and programming paradigms :-)