[recursive]

It shouldn't be that surprising. I tried vim for a while, but I prefer sublime text. It's true that vim is more powerful, but for me that power seems to mostly theoretical. It doesn't seem to make me significantly faster in the real world. On the other hand, the basic text navigation keys in sublime text are the same as they are elsewhere in my os, so I don't have to switch in and out of "text editing mode" frequently. In any case, congratulations on advanced text editing learning curve.

[vec]

A bit off topic, but the big win with Vim (and, from what I hear, emacs) isn't the speed per se; it's the lack of cognitive load. "I need to replace everything after the equals sign", for example, takes less concentration than "I need to move my cursor to the beginning of the word after the equals sign, hold shift, move it to the end of the line, and then hit backspace". Once I got past the terrible learning curve, being able to use those kind of abstractions made a noticeable difference in how much program state I can hold in my head while I'm changing it.

[pistacchioso]

I think vi speed is much more theoretical than practical. v5j to select the 5 lines below? Sure, I can't think of a faster mode. BUT in reality

1. you have to check if you're in insert mode or not. Or you think you are, you're not, write vf5, press esc, press u to undo, retype vf5. Or you don't know and you press esc before it, so it's actually esc+v5j, and esc is not the easiest reachable key

2. you have to know you want to go down 5 lines. In reality, you know you want to go "a bit" down, so in a real world situation you either count (slow), make a subtraction with line numbers (slow) try to guess a number of lines, check what you've reached, keep retyping. This is all but "cognitive free". What is cognitive free (although requires more keystroke) is just press shift+down+down+down+down+down, for me.

[_pius]

I see your perspective, but I disagree that vi speed is mostly theoretical.

1. you have to check if you're in insert mode or not.

You should always be in normal mode unless you're actively inserting, so this shouldn't be something you really have to think about.

2. you have to know you want to go down 5 lines....

Since your example assumes that line numbers are visible, you could just type vnG, where n is the line number you're trying to put the cursor before. No subtraction needed. Depending of the shape of the text, there are probably other intuitive approaches as well.

Does the "tao" of vi take time to internalize? Sure. But once you've done that, you can be blazing fast.

[vec]

There's nothing wrong with typing Vjjjjj until it looks right, and you can still click and drag if that's what seems easiest to you. But if you're thinking of it in lines and characters you're missing the real advantage.

You're still mentally translating a what into a how. You almost certainly don't want to highlight 5 lines down for its own sake, you probably want to highlight, say, the body of a function. Vim provides a command to just do that directly.

[hexasquid]

2 - That's where relative line numbers come in.

[chipotle_coyote]

I have a love/hate relationship with Vim due to that sort of thing. In theory I agree with you; in practice I find it very easy to mis-navigate in Vim and find myself next to the wrong equals sign, or on the wrong side of the equals sign, or what have you. And in my experience, recovering from one of those errors, as quick as it is, makes me wonder why I didn't just use the mouse (or trackball, in my case) to click next to the damn equals sign in the first place. (Keyboard jockeys -- which I'm frequently one of, to be fair -- often underestimate how fast using the mouse actually is, I suspect, because we think of it as, "Oh, I have to move my hand all the way over there and move something and then move back, that's nuts!" Again in practice, I suspect the mouse removes a great deal of the cognitive load involved in navigation, and that may balance out more often than we're inclined to give it credit for.)

Incidentally, in Sublime Text -- as well as Emacs and most Mac OS X applications, as this is a system-wide keyboard binding -- you could just hit ^K after the equals sign for "delete everything from here to the end of the line."

[rpc_was_taken]

In fact Plan9's sam and acme claimed the use of mouse was indeed faster based on studies. See http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/mouse_vs._keyboard/

[kansface]

Minus of course the 3 months of concerted efforts and years thereafter learning the intricacies of vim/emacs to make such edits automatic.

Vim and Emacs are both such strange editors- I'd be quite happy if some other open source editor replaced them both as the default editor (that made better decisions in terms of plugins and abstruse key sequences).