I've noticed the people who work to master the tools of their trade are also the people who master the trade itself. I've yet to meet someone who mastered the trade without also mastering the tools they use.
This is because what really seems to matter is their prespective at things and what decisions they take then. Sure knowing their tools inside out will make them faster, but it is not the KEY thing of why you would take them over every other person. Unless of course your job very focused on these tools (e.g. hand crafting etc) and even there knowledge often trumps tools.
Tools are just tools. If you look at a Cameraperson at a movie set, you will see it even more so. A young guy who knows that 50k€ Arri Alexa inside out might be ending up making worse images than that old fart who just knows where to put it and how to press record. That young guy would be a perfect camera assistant tho. Making pictures is not the camera, just like writing code is not the editor.
If I manage to get to the same thing as you, it doesn't matter if I use notepad.exe, a typewriter or pen and paper, unless it takes me ten times as long. But nearly none of the time consuming problems I had with code were ever due to the fact that my editor slowed me down, but rather that I wasn't aware of parts of my code.
I aknowledge however that people are different, and maybe it could be distracting if your editor is to slow depending on the type of person you are. I also like smooth workflows where things don't get in my way also in vim, but there is a threshold above which it bascially won't matter anymore.
It doesn't really matter what tools you choose, provided you know them well and they're well suited for your work.
Maybe we also got it upside down? What if experts tend to be good with their tools, because they had a ton of experience with them and not the other way round. So they are not experts because they use their tools well, but they use tools well because they had a lot of time spent with these.
That is, if you are in a profession were the tools stay the same. The sound mixers I mentioned certainly know SOME workflows inside out, but mixing desks change and differ between manufacturers, get more modern etc. That means judging a sound mixer purely by his ability to handle a certain mixing desk on one point in time might not be completely representative of the man/woman’s abilities.
For programming it is much the same. A perfectly guru programmer could have switched to vim just months ago, while anoob could have invedted a year into learning vim instead of gaining experience with code.
But I'll agree with you in this way - there are a lot of people who want to just get good at their tools (huge vimrc that's mostly unused) and don't care about how well they actually write code. I think it stems from procrastinating.
This analogy is not good in that prepping is a major part of the complete task. To fix the analogy, consider the same scenario, but prepping now takes only 2 minutes per complete meal and can be cut down to 30 seconds given years of training.
In all seriousness, I personally see marginal at best benefit to getting better at text editors. I do occasionally learn things that improve my workflow, but I prefer to spend time on other things, there's enough subjects I'll already never know as much as I'd wish about...
Learning every nook and cranny of your editor is just a waste of time. As an old advertisement said "It's a tool, not an art form. Why are you wasting your time learning it"
Tools should get out of the way. I like Vim but I'm not going out of my way to do something that I could do more easily in another editor or with another tool (or just do manually).
Your code is not going to be 10x better because you know some extra Vim or Emacs magic. Even those powerful "do all" Java IDEs, while very helpful, don't write the code for you. There's no magic, miracle or hidden power there. It makes some things extremely easy but it won't write the code for you
Learn it if you like but don't expect any epiphany coming from it.
But think about it this way. Leaning your editor in full and taking advantage of what it offers -- no matter what editor your chose is ensuring that tool gets out of your way.
There are a lot of tedious things when editing and writing code. And by using your editor to aid, you get a lot of advantages.
1) you can do it in less time. 2) the chances of making a mistake on something repetitive goes down when you use your tool to aid you. 3) Using the editors advanced features can often make boring task fun.
I also think you are slightly wrong. While not 10x better code. I expect the code coming from somebody who uses their editor in full will produce better looking more consistent code.
EDIT: removing snark.
Sure, you might be willing to spend that kind of time configuring your editor, but most people just want to do their job and get on.
It's the same reason most people don't use Arch Linux or Gentoo even though they might be arguably superior–not everybody wants to spend their spare time editing config files.
I wonder how many people would still vouch for Vim if they spent as much time learning a modern editor as Vim. But frankly, I don't think it's possible to spend as much time configuring any other editor as much as Vim, since most editors can do out of the box what hundreds of lines of .vimrc can't accomplish.
It's like you want to e.g. "change what's inside those parens", or "just open a new line above this one". Vim has those exact commands.
I don't consider text editing speed that important to my programming productivity. I like things that help me comprehend code, like syntax highlighting and being able to easily jump to definitions or a tool tip telling me what arguments a function needs.
This is not directed at you particularly, but when I see people say they are faster at navigating the cursor with hjkl than the arrow keys, I can't help but roll my eyes. I'm pretty comfortable with navigating text in Vim. It's great how little strain it puts on your arms to not have to reach for your mouse. But overall the mouse is such a superior pointing device, and I have to use it for tons of other stuff anyway, that I feel like I'm putting a lot less overall strain on myself by using a "normal" modern non-modal editor.
I've used Vim for years. But after forcing myself to learn to use the mouse for text editing tasks, I'm actually in the Zone a lot more often. I almost feel like a 10x-er in comparison to my Vim years.
...and now you know another one ;-)
A lot of others are very surprised when they see me work without using any IDE, just multiple text editors and terminal windows. I don't need syntax highlighting or any other fanciness like autoformatting; in fact I find them distracting. I use Notepad on Windows and Vim elsewhere, and on the latter have Visual Studio only for its debugger (but will sometimes use WinDbg instead.) I believe much of why I do this is because I started without any IDE, sometimes even writing lots of code by hand on paper and thinking about it before entering it into the computer. When IDEs became available, I didn't see much point in changing my workflow.
Contrast this with some coworkers who have such a plugin-ful IDE and are so accustomed to using it that they'd rather wait upwards of half a minute to open a source code file than browse to the file in the filesystem and open it with a text editor. These same coworkers also complain about why their machines are so slow...
I wonder if those others you know also started the "old school" way.
I've tried to write (i.e. read) code without syntax highlighting for giggles, too. But I felt like it really slowed me down (i.e. cost me more energy to focus).
You know there is a middle ground between Notepad and Visual Studio, in various places on the spectrum, right?
If you consider that the final outcome of any programming exercise is a text file then yes, any editor can be used to produce that file.
Also the quality of the code found in that file is entirely dependent on the quality of the programmer and not the editor used.
However, what a good programmer's editor brings to the table is the ability to produce that same code in a shorter period of time.
But, there are people who enjoy and master the trade without mastering the tools as well :)
But it's not like when VS Code released, all the vimzards who went to use it suddenly became awful at their job.
Having used both vim and chisels, with varying degrees of mastery.
Many great musicians haven't mastered their instruments because many styles of music don't ask for it. So that analogy is arguing against your own point.
Great a great golfer is more or less synonymous with being good at golf. A better analogy to text editing and programming would be a golf player being obsessed with caddies.