[ken_railey]

> In the context of starting, launching, growing, evolving and maintaining a tech business

Possibly, but some people are not starting, launching, growing, or evolving anything but software - and a text editor is where 99% of that work happens.

[robomartin]

That's interesting. I would say that somewhere between 50% to 75% of my time when creating a software product is devoted to documenting requirements, analyzing the problem, studying candidate solutions, working out such things as state diagrams with, yes, paper and pencil and, in general, thinking and planning.

I haven't measured it but I'd venture to say that actual time typing code is probably somewhere in the order of 15% to 30% of a project, if that high. In fact, I really doubt that initial code entry goes much past 20% of my time.

Then there's testing, debugging and source control/management. If the project requires media a substantial amount of time might also be devoted to the creation and management of image, video and sound assets.

One interesting thing is that as the years went by and I became more experienced I quickly spent less and less time debugging. My code is largely bug-free due to the fact that I devote a lot of time and effort to initial planning before I even think about firing-up a text editor at all.

So, yes, your claim that 99% of the work in creating a software product happens in the editor is something that can only be true for an absolute rank newbie. I don't know many experienced programmers that, for a non-trivial project, just launch into an editor and spend 99% of their time there.

Don't take my word for it:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/when-understanding-...

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/93302/spendin...

[LinXitoW]

Its nice for you that you're advanced in your carrier that coding is such a small part of what you do, but its obvious that theres enough people that arent quite as godlike as you. Good for you.

Personally, the one thing vim(and Linux) have taught me is that mastering your tools is hard in the short but entirely worth it in the long run. Do really never learn shortcuts or concepts or the tools you use? A language is just as much a tool as a text editor.

How much of your time did you waste here, religiously debating religious vim users? At least from here(the internet can distort things) it seems you're just as religiously anti as they are pro.

[robomartin]

There's a big difference. Now I have the luxury of time. That was not the case ten years ago.