I recognise there are other better ways to move around but they too often have drawbacks, like moving somewhere with ‘/‘. You have to parse the line you want to move to for a unique string that’s close to where you’re going. Then you have to scan over all the text in between to make sure it doesn’t occur too much there.
Maybe I’m still just doing it wrong.
Correction - you must move your mouse hand from the keyboard, move the mouse to the desired location, _then_ click.
Ergonomic concern often goes side-by-side with editors like vim.
I'm also not convinced that comparing the simple editor things is demonstrating the value of vim much. It's how easy vim handles the _not_ simple things, and also how easy it is to motion the often unique or rarely used edits, combined with drop-of-the hat programmability, that makes vim a good choice.
>how easy vim handles the _not_ simple things
Agreed, despite any minor differences in movement speed, even '.' by itself is useful enough to never switch back.
And casual keyboard-commands just don't scale well. Moving cursor x chars means you must type the movement-key x times. With vi you just type the number x and the movement, and usually save big time.
Aditionally, vi has more knowledge about textual objects, which are all interchangable. So whether you move 3 chars, words, paragraphs, pages or functions, it's all the same, just with different letters.
Vi's command-language is highly composable and thus very dense, so it will alwys be faster than mouse and casual editor-commands. Of course as long as you habit them.