[ufmace]

It does all come down to personal preference in the end. I can only describe why I prefer Vim. I specifically do not recommend it to anybody else - it's hard enough to learn that you have to decide on your own that you want to make the effort.

In my opinion, the real drag of conventional text editing is constantly having to move between the keyboard and mouse. That's a much more physically and mentally expensive mode switch than any editor mode switch. It always tends to hurt my focus on whatever I'm working on. Vim feels like I have all of the movement types in muscle memory, and it just seems to happen automatically.

I know all editors have keyboard shortcuts. I think they're all much more awkward and inefficient than Vim though. Too many steps and too much thought for "how do I move the cursor over there without using the mouse". When it gets beyond the basics, the keyboard shortcuts either don't exist at all, or vary widely between editors. How do I split a view into 2 sections and switch between them with only the keyboard in VS Code? Beats me. Oh it may be possible, but if so, it's probably different in IDEA, Eclipse, full VS, Sublime Text, etc. Vim is always Vim.

I also find most of the IDE features for live error checking and auto-complete to be more distracting than helpful, at least for dynamic languages. It's subtly annoying and harmful to my focus for my editor to be constantly trying to tell me about the "syntax errors" in code I'm not finished writing yet, or to constantly pop up completely wrong autocomplete suggestions. I prefer to run these checks or unit tests explicitly on command, when I'm ready for it.