Doesn't that just mean you've selected VIM's syntax for all your IDE's? Most IDE's seem to have plugins for other popular editors.
Maybe this is a mindset issue, but I'm having a hard time imagining how one would want to just get the work done, without trying to pick up a skill in the process.
Despite the current UX trends of dumbing down software, it's rare you'll use a tool just once in your lifetime.
My wife has used SublimeText and Notepad++ for total of maybe 10 hours in her entire life. I'm not suggesting her to learn Vim (or Emacs), because the kinds of tasks she does with computers don't benefit that much from a proper text editor. However, most developers spent inordinate amount of time editing plain text files, and a lot of tasks they do in other tools - like task management, time tracking, documentation writing, drawing diagrams, commenting on StackOverflow - could receive stupidly huge efficiency improvements by being done in plain text too. Vim and Emacs are the two tools that are dedicated for precisely this class of problems. In my opinion, the couple dozen hours one has to invest over the course of a month to get some basic proficiency in them is worth the across-the-board payoff in work speed and comfort.
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One trick I've learned is being explicit and deliberate about learning. To things like learning a new piece of software, recursive Pareto rule applies - 20% of time gives you 80% of value. 4% of time gives you 64% of value. So, say you're willing to entertain the thought of learning a little bit of Vim. Allocate a single pomodoro to it right now, and fire up vimtutor. 25 minutes, full focus. You'll notice it only takes a few minutes to break through your own habits and learn the basics of a new interface. You'll be impressed by how much you've learned in just 25 minutes[0]. Next step: commit to 5 hours over a week. 10 pomodoros. Find some introductory tutorials, and work through them this way.
Personally, I did above trick a couple of times to learn new Emacs features. Getting comfortable with multiple cursors, or with paredit, are things that turned out to take 1 or 2 pomodoros, and have been improving my editing speed and comfort for the past couple years.
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WRT. mindset, a proper one can smooth out the learning curve quite well. The most basic trick that I see even developers not recognizing is this: every time you click on a button in your program, figure out if there's a keyboard shortcut for it. If there is, try to use it instead. Soon, you'll find yourself working much faster and comfortable than before.
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[0] - though you'll lose half of it in a day. Committing new skills to long-term memory takes more time and exposure; muscle memory takes even more. Good news is, this happens pretty much by itself, as you apply the new skills to the tasks you're doing.
Most people don't want to put in anything more than 40 hour work week these days. Which also means no time to learn and upgrade your skill set. That is for doing their everyday tasks.
Now selling vim or emacs to this set of people would never work for one reason. They just can't get themselves to spend that time.
That's also a big reason why people hate Nerds. These people spend to get better at things in a way we don't want to.
And truthfully, the productivity wins for me weren't so much tied into being able to input text at a faster rate with Vim.
It was being able to leverage Vim itself to help me rethink and reshape how I organize large amounts of structured text, which saves a lot of time and headaches when dealing with files. Plus there's other wins too with limelight and video editing (an added bonus).
I'm still not 100% as fast as I was with VSCode for inputting and editing text but after 2 weeks of using Vim, it's not a complete train wreck anymore. It was brutal for days, but it's slowly getting better.
Bonus points for using it in mutt for all electronic correspondence.
Also, why the Dickens are you using Windows when your heart clearly yearns for a nice native i3 setup?
That was explained a few weeks ago in this post:
https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/i-tried-linux-as-my-main-dev-...
Ah OK. Haven't had that myself, even using USB audio interfaces in a similar fashion, so I wouldn't put that down to Linux. I use monitor speakers and have good hearing and definitely not getting those issues with a simple pulseaudio setup. I flick between youtube, cmus, recording on my old Zoom H2, audio from a VM etc. so have run the gamut of opportunities for it to pop and click.
Sounds like you had to spend a lot of time troubleshooting and in the end thought it wasn't worth the fight. I hear you, but I would see if I could borrow another audio interface from a store or contact of yours before giving up on OS-freedom for good. The Scarlett is an entry-level device anyway, known to have dubious build quality. I'd also take it up with the manufacturer before looking for more fixes.
Good luck!
After I finish this next course I will try again with a different distro, and then see if my other USB mic that worked on the Chromebook (running native Linux) also works on my main machine.