I often navigate with the search. It's fast as I usually know where I want to go.

Also with the right setting(I think incsearch) Vim immediately jumps to the first result as you type, so I often use search to quickly peek at some code and then jump back with Esc when it doesn't warrant splitting the buffer.

But I do still struggle a bit with moving within the line - w and b tend to "get caught" in long series of different symbol categories that Vim will all see as separate words/tokens. At least I got my setup with the "camelcasemotion" plugin working, which is a great help with long identifier names.