Not sure if you over read the second part of that phrase, but I have serious doubts whether the efficiency gains touted by Vim users are real or only perceived. I'd like to see some good hard data on that, comparing users of similar proficiency level at various editing styles.

Honestly, I use vim too, and I have learnt the "language" of vim i.e. the grammar and consider myself an advanced beginner.

I have doubts whether the efficiency gains are that useful in every day life. There will some days where I make some pretty widespread refactoring changes over files or the yanking/register stuff can be quite useful, but in general, every day programming, I don't see the efficiency gains.

I have another theory for why people like Vim so much.

Using vim makes you feel like the old-school, crazy powerful, very smart programmers shown in Hollywood. It makes you realize the dream that the little child had when he saw programmers on TV. ( at least for me ) and honestly, its more fun to be doing that so I do it. :)

Maybe I am not that good at vim. But at my level, i don't see great efficiency gains. I simply see more fun gains, and that's good enough for me.

Thank you. The main gain I see in vim is being able to edit configs on any server through SSH. In an environment with IaC policy this gain basically falls away however. What's left is being able to do small edits where launching e.g. VS Code would take too long. That's where I still use it.

I'd think the ergonomics argument is just wrong wrt. repetitive stress. Isn't more variation in movement pretty much always better in that regard?