Editors do make a difference in your productivity - that is why people have favourites and why they have flamewars. That productivity matters.

How do these people know it makes a difference? Do they measure their productivity? Is there any scientific research on this?

Similarly, a top flight programmer who has mastered emacs or vim or Sublime Text won't be operating at a conscious level but will be controlling the environment in front of them at a far higher level, especially if the conceptual model of the text buffer is the same no matter what they're doing with it.

An extreme comparison would be to sit two people of the same ability down in front of the Linux kernel source tree, one armed with emacs, cscope, syntax highlighting, org-mode and cc-mode and the other with nano and see who is faster at some non-trivial task.

Sure you don't. You can feel the difference. The problem occurs when people treat their editors as an extension of themselves and can't tell the difference between "not liking you" and "not liking your editor", eventually getting defensive. That's a "cognitive level" I don't want to get myself into.

I've interviewed people who were exposed to Nano at school, and have never tried out any other editor. They are missing out on productivity improvements available in many other editors. More middling of the scale I've also interviewed someone who used Eclipse as their first editor and has proceeded to use it ever since despite not working on Java projects any more. That isn't bad per se, but I rank someone higher if they at least try out others every now and then.

The fact that people feel strongly about something does not mean it is important. Lots of people have very strong feelings about the New Jersey Devils or the Miami Heat. That doesn't mean that sports or teams matter.

I'm not saying your conclusion is wrong, but your comment does not constitute a valid argument in favor of that conclusion.

Which would probably be important if you were interviewing them to be local sportscasters in those markets, no?

I meant important to them individually, not the whole world

I've tried to pick up Vim several times and never made it very far. But at least I know "i" and ":wq" now :)

If I want to select four lines of text in any text editor that isn't vim, I just hold down the shift key and use any of the cursor navigation available to me. Not so in vim.

Upon leaving vim none of the key bindings are never used in any other program. That's antithetical to the manner in which I operate. Normally if a program doesn't support the odd keybinding or two I just use autohotkey or equivalent. But vim makes that impossible.

I personally find the navigation of vim so convenient that I use vimperator for Firefox, as well as the built in vim mode of sublime text.

I totally get that vim is a completely unnatural fit for some people. I certainly don't hold that against them, and I hope they don't hold it against me or vim itself.

That's actually not true at all. Lots of terminal programs have keybindings for stuff like hjkl. Even tig does. And if you're using git from the command line and haven't heard of tig, you need to look it up.

Even many roguelike games support vim keybindings for movement. Brogue is an example.

    echo "set editing-mode vi" > ~/.inputrc

    echo "bind -v" > ~/.editrc

Absolutely. Well, maybe I wouldn't call it "wired", but no one tool is right for everyone, and no one should feel bad or wrong for using something different.

I am a Vim lover. You can pry Vim from my cold, dead fingers. But of course it's not for everyone, for the same reason that we don't all use just one programming language or one web framework.

If you are burning all your cycles trying to map the natural way your brain wants to operate to the way your text editor operates, what do you have left for the real work?

If you want to learn vim, by all means go ahead. But feel no shame if it just doesn't fit you.

This is how I learned Vim, so as far as I know it's the best resource out there.

I say this as someone who uses vim very nearly exclusively.

I end up using visual mode a lot in VIM because it's often faster (or easier) than stopping to count how many times I need to repeat the operation.

Combining vim and tmux with the basix Unix command line and a few other tools like ack, tig, etc., gives me an environment that I can't really replicate with desktop applications, at least not on OS X, which lacks a true tiling window manager (i.e., one which, unlike slate, spectacle, etc., tiles the windows for you automatically). I've considered a switch to Linux for xmonad, but I still love OS X overall and am more than happy with my terminal workflow.

I work with two 27-inch monitors, and I like to dedicate one entire monitor to a single full-screen terminal with tmux as the window manager.

Admittedly, this has its downsides. For instance, I feel hopeless trying to do serious coding on Windows.