[manigandham]

Or just use the mouse to point and click in the same time. With laptop mousepads it's just moving a finger. Most devs aren't writing that much code and all these Vim efficiencies are vastly overstated.

I've seen many Vim/Emacs-only devs being easily beaten in speed by others using modern IDEs that have tooling and functionality (auto formatting, refactoring, templating, etc) focused on actually getting things done.

[eloff]

Exactly this. I pick type, and I've never found that it feels too slow. I spend more time thinking about the change I want to make, and reading the code to plan that, than actually making the change most of the time. My typing speed wouldn't address the bottleneck. I think vim is the same. Sure you can edit the text faster, but that's not the bottleneck anyway.

[iLemming]

Vim was never about typing efficiency. However, it is indeed the best way to navigate and edit text. This statement is very subjective because, just like any tool, it depends on the user. Chainsaw looks ugly, heavy, cumbersome and dangerous to someone who doesn't know how to use it. But with some practice it becomes an incredibly efficient tool. People make ice sculptures using chainsaws.

And I'm not talking about Vim the editor. I'm talking about Vim as an idea. Which is today implemented for pretty much every single [popular] editor and IDE in use. That fact alone is pretty illustrative of awesomeness of the idea of Vim.

And the comment about Emacs is quite disingenuous. I have never been inside a Formula One cockpit, but I can totally get "the job done" with my Camry, because it is totally more efficient for parallel parking.

I have used many IDEs, including InteliJ (which I used for about seven years). Emacs wins solely by its extensibility, no editor/IDE has ever matched its capabilities. For some people that is not an important factor, just like the efficient parallel parking might not be important for Formula One pilots. But when you can automate pretty much anything it feels very empowering and liberating.

Small example: when I'm about the create a new commit, an emacs-lisp script can figure out the current ticket I'm working on (based on currently clocked Org-mode task), generate a branch name based on the ticket description, generate part of the commit message (in the way that it is in compliance with git tool like gommit), I would just have to type the rest of the message.

That is not only more efficient, but also reduces frustration. Compare that with the workflow in any other editor and IDE - most of these steps will have to be manual. Then someone might say: oh there's actually a plugin for Editor X that does some of that stuff for Jira. But what if I join a different company that uses Pivotal Tracker instead? I can extend my emacs-lisp script. Whereas if that's an InteliJ plugin I would either have to go through daunting process of forking and modifying the plugin or submit a feature request and wait for something that may never happen.

[nickysielicki]

I switched to vscode recently from emacs and was embarrassed about how much more productive I was, almost immediately.

[Aeolun]

I think where the IDE’s are really powerful is when refactoring. Need that one class renamed? File is automatically renamed too, and all references in every file that link to it (instantiations, calls, imports) are updated too.

[manigandham]

Exactly, the code structure, navigation and intellisense features are far more useful and let you code at the same level of abstraction as the logic you're coding.

Moving a little bit faster through the text file to edit characters is rarely the issue and I certainly wouldn't give up IDE features for it.