For example, let's say you want to put the cursor next to a specific word in a sentence.

If you use the mouse, now you need to stop writing, goto the mouse, find your mouse pointer, look at the mouse pointer, then move the mouse to the word you want to be at, click the mouse and start typing again.

I'm an avid gamer. I'm super used to this. I can move my mouse at pixel precision and do it very quickly, but even if it's fast, it's still a context switch.

With Vim, it almost feels like Vim itself is another input device that's almost a mind control device. I can just direct my eyes to the word I want to move to, hit 3 keys and then have my cursor jump directly to it (by using vim-sneak and pressing any 2 characters of the word).

Even if doing this is only equal speed to the mouse, it's still a win in my book because it feels less of a context switch. Plus if you want to talk about mistakes, looking at the word you want to jump to instead of your mouse cursor forces you to look at the word, so you have 1 more chance of avoiding a spelling mistake -- although to be fair, most editors including Vim can visually show you these errors.

wow, that's pretty cool!

With vim being on every system, i don't really carry much baggage around. I have my vim settings file in cloud storage. And maybe one pluggin (NERDTree) on my main machine.

I'm not even waiting on people with Vim problems anymore during the lectures. I just go on, they will catch up.

I believe that there may be some post hoc, ergo propter hoc at play here.

For instance did you include the age of the persons in your observations? It wouldn't be surprising that the persons choosing vim are a bit older on average, and then one could think that they have a bit less stamina and are exhaust faster?

Or maybe they are actually doing more, like spending part of their energy helping others? That's also a pattern you can see often in group training sessions.

Also, you mentioned that you won't help them with the "weird issues" they usually have with vim. Do you apply the same treatment to non-vim users?

That being said one person's anecdote supporting a highly subjective opinion deserves to be torn to shreds without ample evidence or at least better context.

I don't think that makes any sense at all. If anything Vim does a lot for me because it's programmable. When doing heavy editing, the whole point is the automation does the heavy lifting.

Switching modes doesn't have any cognitive load effects that I can notice. The cursor changes the shape for example, so you instantly know what to do. It's pretty much second nature.

What you're describing is a novice or clumsy Vim user. I don't know what "compatibility problems" should have a text editor, but I haven't had any in many years.

> So, yes. Vim may be fun. [...] But I don't buy the productivity boost.

Kind of condescending, really. Thinking that Vim is a toy and all users are using it for the heck of it, when they could be more productive otherwise.

Even if the correlation is real, there's just no way that difference between using vim and using something else is so great that it's causing people to exhaust themselves, so best case scenario there's some hidden variable causing it.

Give me VS Code with the Vim plugin and I'll code circles around someone using the standard controls simply because it takes so little effort to do most complex things and if a mouse actually makes things faster, I can use that too.