> The problem was having to focus too much of my mind on how to use the editor. Muscle memory is invaluable, and Vim just doesn't let my muscle memory take over if I keep having to think about what's the most "efficient" way to move around or change text.

IME, you do develop muscle memory in terms of using more "efficient" ways of navigation and text manipulation after using vim for a while. I guess it's sort of like learning how to drive a vehicle equipped with a manual transmission. At first, you're thinking more about how to shift through the gears and use the clutch. After a while, you don't really think about it too much while you're still doing it. After driving a bit longer, you start to get a feel about which gear to choose for a given traffic situation.

So, similarly, you get a feel about which keybinding to use to change certain types of text or do certain movements without having to think too much about it.

Normal vim users aren't thinking about the most efficient way to perform an edit, but rather just go with muscle memory. Said vim users also don't write blog articles on how to be more efficient with vim.

Well after 5 years of using Vim, the muscle memory for more efficient operations never kicked in. I was either holding "h" and "l" to move around, or I was consciously thinking of the more efficient combined operations like "f.ce.com^[". And that conscious thinking was very distracting from the actual code I was editing.

I used vim for everyday use for almost ten years before I realized that navigating around with the keyboard would never be as good as clicking a mouse. All the mental overhead of trying to be efficient with vim, for me at least, ended up being a bit of a false oasis.

I happily switched to Sublime for two years and then VS Code. I still use emacs with Clojure though.

Similar story here. I use IntelliJ for Java and Emacs for Clojure. We're porting our codebase from Clojure to Java at work, so soon it'll all be IntelliJ, which will be pretty sweet. I do kinda miss Paredit, but IntelliJ makes up for it with lots of other pretty sweet features.

Out of interest did you try using the Vim plugins for Clojure?

I'm only playing, but found a good set-up with vim-fireplace; vim-clojure-highlight; vim-sexp; Vim-sexp-mappings-for-regular-people; vim-surround and luochen1990/rainbow

Emacs is unbeatable for editing lisp code. Geiser, Quack, SLIME, and CIDR are all excellent.

What prevents you from using vim inefficiently in the same manner?