> Also, I am not really convinced of the merits of Vim for LaTeX. Most of my time writing is spent revising, which requires a lot of "random access edits," and I'm at least twice as fast at jumping to arbitrary locations on screen using a mouse as I am with vim (even with the usual tricks).

> (I tend to think of vim as something that was purpose-built for programming in C and with usefulness inversely proportional to how far a given task is from that purpose. While I realize that's not entirely accurate, I've found it a good heuristic. Programming: vim works decently for me. General purpose writing: not so much.)

I don't want to comment on the kerning stuff (I don't really know much about it). However, I found your comment about the merits of vim when revising interesting. Like you, I spend most of my time writing revising/correcting (often other peoples work), however my take on vim is just the other way around.

If I write a large text myself, it doesn't really matter what editor I use, it's when I revise/correct things that I love using vim. While you might be correct that you would be quicker to move to the appropriate spot using a mouse, I pretty much guarantee that all the gain is gone when you have to switch back to the keyboard to do your change. That's why I love vim for these kind of tasks, the moving and changing of specific text is such a seemless experience without even having to change the hand position on the keyboard. My productivity absolutely plummets every time I have to use word or some other editor for these sort of tasks.