For me Vim productivity gains have more to do with never leaving the shell. Desktop environments are maddeningly rife with distractions
1. Text editing 2. Command Line 3. Program logs 4. Code console
Flipping through them is a breeze, and I never have to leave Terminal. The displays are always simple, straight forward, and focused. No distractions. I'm able to just get in the zone with the code and forget anything else exists.
Then you can, for instance, make your development machine a dedicated cloud server, like digital Ocean etc.
This is what I do and it's very nice to be able to use any hardware I want, including cheap underpowered stuff, since it's just a window to my real machine.
It's very nice!