I’ve been a long time vim user, and I honestly never really bought into the efficiency claims. That gets repeated over and over, but If you’re a slow typer then no editor can really make much of a difference, and development in reality is a lot of reading code and thinking about code when it comes down to it.
I’ve never used it because I thought it would make me some lightning fast super developer. I’ve always used it because it’s simply fun. It’s makes editing into this interesting sort of game. You start out with a simple set of skills from vimtutor, and inevitably brute force your cursor around the screen for a while. Little by little your movements become more complex and efficient, and the journey to figuring that out is fun and interesting.
It makes you think about typing in a totally different way. It makes it into a some kind of interesting game where your goal is to accomplish a task in the fewest keystrokes possible. That problem solving aspect scratches an itch inside my brain that has always kept me coming back. It’s just fun, and I don’t think that gets talked about enough
That's fair, although now and then I have to do some repetitive task and using bufdo or a macro has saved a decent amount of time. And compared to something like notepad, all the little details probably save time. My average time savings has probably increased significantly after I stopped spending a lot of time creating custom vim scripts and syntax files.
It is fun because it is fluent. vi has a language.
If I spend more than a couple minutes in an arrow-keys-and-mouse text editor, I often find myself unconsciously reverting to vi-language and getting confused. "Oh, I want to go change that sentence up the page that starts with 'Looking at...'" so I type "?Looking at" into the text editor and then stare at it for a few seconds before hitting backspace reaching for the mouse like a caveman.
I like to think of it more like a bytecode.
vi definitely doesn't scratch that "itch" for everyone in the same way. But for me, it's as though I found a cheat code. Getting better at vi feels like getting better at a game - only practicing this game makes you better at any number of tasks that are relevant to your daily work.
(although if you also want to get better at typing speed, there are surprisingly fun roguelikes on Steam for just this purpose)
> practicing this game makes you better at any number of tasks that are relevant to your daily work.
Vi key bindings don't apply outside of vi
I learned vi key bindings in rogue, hack, and moria (before numpads were common for that binding to be default) before I learned them in vi.
Thankfully my work applies inside vi.