I use vim, with only the dumb auto-complete, because it forces me to take it easy, to get a more complete mental model of the area of the code I'm working on, and, if it becomes too tangled to keep in my head, the tool won't save me and I'm forced to rethink that part of the program.

It forces me to concentrate a bit more, to focus and achieve a state of mind that I enjoy a lot, where I feel close to the code, at peace, focused.

Back when I started programming, I was using windows notepad, then UltraEdit32, Ms Visual Studio, then on Linux Code::Blocks and Eclipse, and it's so awesome how they can look into the structures and tell me the properties on the objects, but on the other side, it removes the friction of writing ugly structures with too many badly named properties.

So I moved to VIM relatively late.

I dunno, it just gives me a different level of peace and understanding.. It's also practical because I can work over ssh and with tmux, and vim does have nice text-editing capabilities, though I'm often not using it to it's full potential.

The article mentions how our fingers are the bottleneck in turning though into code, maybe those guys are brilliant, or maybe they write too much code, I like to spend time on each and every line, not just pound away like a crazed monkey like I did in my teenage years, I like to consider each line I write, and examine it together with the lines around it and the functions around it and the objects around it, does it fit in, does it feel right, does it perform well.. This takes a long time for me. Maybe I've turned into a bad programmer..

I used to easily monkey 5-600 lines of code out per day, but now I write maybe between 10 and 200, but I find them beautiful and satisfying, almost every one of them, and I feel I've weighted my options for everything I make, and that is very satisfying to me, it gives meaning to my day and makes me want to continue doing what I do.