I usually use Sublime but when I'm ssh'ed to a machine I use vim, so I have some experience. I find that I need to exit insert mode to run commands about half the time, or maybe a little less than half the time, in order to run commands. Maybe thats just due to the type of thing I usually edit though. I don't have enough vim foo to know how to do this, but maybe you do: can you record a session and see how often you pressed escape? I'd be interested to know how often various people press escape.