[marssaxman]

I have long wondered the same. What are people doing which makes them so concerned with the efficiency of their editors? I spend the great majority of my work time reading and thinking. When it seems that solving a problem will require me to change a great deal of code, that's generally a sign that I haven't done enough thinking yet. On the rare occasion that I do need to write a lot of new code at once, it's not that big a deal to just... type it out!

I have had a few co-workers who seemed to spend a great deal of time typing, but I have not generally been impressed with the quality of their work. In fact, the most incompetent developer I have ever met, an enthusiastic proponent of his favorite editor and its automation features, was also the most prolific, routinely churning out hundreds or even thousands of lines of awful, bloated, bug-ridden code a day.

The field of software development is large and varied, so of course it is possible that there are competent people doing solid work which really does involve a tremendous amount of fiddly editing, thereby justifying the otherwise inexplicable degree of attention given to sophisticated editors; but I cannot imagine what their working lives are like, and I hope I never have to find out.