[cma]

To jump around without mouse in vim I usually turn off highlight search by default, or make it a more subtle color and just search a few letters, or % or f and a letter within the line. Can still use the mouse if it is something like a brace on its own surrounded by 5 others. It may be a mode switch but most of the time when I jump somewhere I'm deleting and moving a word or replacing it with cw or C the automatically switches to input mode and overall much faster than going there, shift arrow to select the word and cut paste or typing to replace. There are shorthands like ctrl+backspace but lots of ctrl reaching for multiple things often feels like having to enter a mode over and over or something unless you have them all in mind and dont let up, or need to let up to step the cursor one character with the arrow keys.

VS vim gives you a good mix too and basically while in insert works like a regular editor when that is more natural. But you miss out on piping lines to unix commands and stuff and a common thing of searching all occurrences of an identifier and opening all the files in vim, which warns on exit if you forget to look over all of them. Also ctrl+p to complete to nearest previous occurrence is broken in it.

Overall just much less reaching around for modifiers and arrow keys or home/end but the default placement of ESC is a pain. Switching caps lock to that can help but makes it not great for muscle memory when using other machines.

Ctrl+[ is an alternate for ESC I'll use sometimes but usually only if Ctrl is in my next command. That can be a bit more ergonomic if you change capslock to ctrl instead of ESC and then less chance of messing up in other apps with an errant ESC.

Overall most of the time when I click somewhere I'm deleting/transposing/replacing and not just immediately typing something, and that is much more awkward in a vanilla editor. Maybe with a four button mouse you could have a button to click somewhere and automatically enter insert mode at the same time, without it emitting keys to do it and messing up other apps.

Overall I think vim is much better for RSI, so much stuff is home row, and especially with numpads usually being on the wrong side of the keyboard makes mouse reaching unergonomic. The only main thing keeping me on numpads is Blender, but Blender is surprisingly vim-like as well, in a good way.