Sometimes, the mouse is all you need. That's understandable.

Other times, what you need, is to append a certain string to every line in the text containing a certain regular expression. Other times, you need to delete a column of characters and move that column somewhere else.

Vim (and emacs) is not about the most common keystrokes. It's about every other obscure and relatively rare task that comes up, that in total, add up to become a huge chunk of the working programmer's time. Yes, adding characters to the beginning, middle, or end of a line is easy without vim. Yes, moving up and down paragraphs or around the file can be done without vim. The power of vim is not manifest in these simple maneuvers, but in its expressiveness in handling every other exceptional case.

Every time a vim or emacs user tries to convince me of the virtues of their insanely "powerful" editor I ask them to demonstrate a use-case and have yet to be impressed by a single response. Every example in the stack overflow thread leaves me bored -- if you like tinkering with macros rather than actually getting something done, enjoy your "language". This is the old command-line versus GUI argument writ small.

What I like is watching the vim or emacs advocate show me their macro examples and then showing them how BBedit (for example) leverages regexp (and provides lots of learnable shortcuts, macros, and scripting support) while getting you enormous benefits out of the box because it uses a mouse.

The difference between CLI and GUI is simple. The latter is highly optimized for a particular workflow and to perform a set of preconceived tasks that are baked with a release that gets an occasional update.

If you asked me to show you why I find value in editors like vim and emacs, I'd show you a DSL I wrote for work purposes and show you the extensions I wrote to edit them efficiently. Alternatively, I'd show you a number of customized workflows for cross compiling lua to C# or something.

I've used sublime text, textmate, bbedit and I'm not saying they aren't well designed editors. They are and if the stuff you are doing is stuff that everybody is doing, then great. But I don't think you understand that at this point in time, none of these GUI-based editors come even close to satisfying my personal needs as a developer.

You realize that vim also uses a mouse?

Although I'm a Vim user I appreciate your comment and think you have a good point. However, I can't stand when a commenter anticipates a negative reaction to their post and dares readers to downvote them.

Of all the communities online, let's have faith that at least on HN a well-argued comment will receive recognition whether or not it reflects a popular opinion. To bait downvoters is to imply that this community prizes popularity over integrity, and in doing so polarizes the discussion.

Don't see it as a dare. See it as reverse psychology.