The $50 million (in 1989) research figure sounds impressive, but they don't say how much of that was keyboard-vs-mouse research and the answer is quite likely "very little".

It seems that, like most UX research, they were testing how well novices manage rather than how well people do after weeks of experience (the latter is expensive to test!).

When you get to "It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function." it's clear that what they were looking at is a very very long way from how a typical Vim or Emacs user works.

I think the article _is_ interesting as evidence for the proposition "it's possible for people to believe that they're quicker with the keyboard when they're not". But it's nowhere near enough evidence to get as far as "we can dismiss people who believe they're quicker with the keyboard as mistaken".

You could certainly reproduce those results - if the only program you test them with is MS Wordpad. If you're doin surveys involving editors that have a thought-through keyboard interface and with people who are actually trained in it, the result would never even be in the same ballpark. What we're looking for is the skill ceiling, not the skill floor.

Here is what's annoying: having to frequently move back and forth between the keyboard and mouse. Having to glance down to find the mouse to do one thing and then back to keyboard starts to break one's train of thought.

Do people still consider the results of this study valid? A mouse in 1989 was nothing like a mouse now.

But vim doesn't make you count either... press "/{" and then repeat "n" until you land on the correct character. Also for selecting lines shift+V and jk{} etc will get me there with no counting. I've used vim for years and I never count I just use visual mode.

Touchpads make it super easy to deal with acceleration better I found.

However, with regards to your example, things like easy motion/avy solve this exact problem, I think no slower than a mouse. You basically punch in one, two, or more characters at the place you want to jump (depending which package/command you call), and then every match on the screen is highlighted and replaced with a different letter. Then you press that letter and jump there.

Not arguing that's it's much better, just that's approximately the same. Check it out: https://github.com/abo-abo/avy.

Check out avy-goto-char! In my setup, `<SPC> j j {` and then one or two homerow keys would move the cursor there. And the rest of the avy functions are useful as well: https://github.com/abo-abo/avy/blob/master/README.md

There are other options too that can be situationally more efficient, but avy-goto-char is faster than reaching for your mouse (at least anecdotally) and you don't have to think about.

I think that you have not learned to move around efficiently in vim. I would never enter that curly-brace command. I think most of my moving is with w, which jumps one word at a time. I also use / to search and page up and down. It sounds like you may be using harder commands than I do.

Becoming efficient with vim takes a little effort and practice, and you seem to have not committed to one single editor. You can't expect to be very good at every editor at the same time.

I suppose I'm not a Vim superstar, but I've been using it since before the 6.0 release, and still use it today. You're right that it's not the only editor that I use, but it turns out that even if you can't be very good at every editor, when you've been using computers for nearly four decades you can be reasonably good at two or three.

This plugin solves the curly brace issue. I find if there is something you find repeatedly annoying, there is probably a plugin to solve it. That or you suddenly have an interesting side project!