[drwu]

Agree that decisions/designs are important.

However, not everything can be well designed at the beginning. Skills of editing will affect efficiency, especially in a try-and-error loop of new ideas/approaches, where only a rough design exists.

Besides, some niche editing tasks (which may involve column editing, macro recording then batched execution, regex based operation, encoding transformation etc.) may otherwise require writing awk/sed or even perl/python scripts as subprojects to achieve, if one does not known the editor well.

[jakupovic]

>column editing

I haven't seen any other editor that comes anywhere near the capabilities provided by VIM. I spend a lot of time manipulating data into columnar form and for anything early vim does it effortlessly.

[jama211]

Oh for sure, for specialised complex text manipulation tasks if you’re doing them often it’s definitely a tool for the job.

[jama211]

If you’re often doing hardcore text manipulation that’s a bit of a different story, I just personally think the average dev thinks they do that more than they actually do.