Yea... and then when you're finally know what to do, you're held back by bottlenecks and deficits of your editor/IDE. Doing "context switch" on your brain, switching from the problem you're programming to "how the heck do I tell it to stop auto-indenting 8char tabs?!" is frustrating. It's slowing you down. Things get only worse when you're dealing with many files.

It's not the "typing time" that good editors save you, it's the "thinking time" they save since you're not forced to think much about them.

When I was forced to switch from Visual Studio 6 to VS2003, my productivity really suffered. Things did not work the way I wanted and I kept cold-rebooting my brain after every little interruption. Now I'm switching to vim and while it may not be as "fast" for certain tasks, its consistency and transparency makes me forget it's there. Besides, by not relying on arrow keys, pageup/down, del/ins and so on, vim allows me to be equally productive on unknown keyboards, especially on laptops, easily switching computers, which I happen to do quite often.

I agree with both of you, but I think it is wise to choose a good editor when you start. If the editor is any good, it can help you and reduce the time it takes to program, so more time is spent on thinking than typing. I'm sure you don't use Notepad or Nano.

But, yeah, dead topic to me, I already chose my editor and could care less what someone else says, only if it's about a new one, then I may care.