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But, and here’s the kicker, if I hadnt been pushed into vim I would not be nearly as productive now.It's interesting how the winds have changed toward Vim advocacy in a quarter century or so.
I switched to Vim around 1994, amidst a definitely anti-vi climate. In the university environment, almost nobody used vi. I remember nothing but vi trash talk.
The computing environment was proprietary Unix without a whole lot of freeware at all. Free Unix was just beginning to rise in the word. Only in the freeware world surrounding the Linux kernel and GNU utilities did I begin to discover alternative programs like Vim, still far from any sort of mainstream at that time.
I saw all this trash talking as weakness; by making fun of trivialities like the command sequence to get out of a program, you're just showing you're a moron. I looked into it and found it wasn't difficult at all.
Until then, all editors I ever used were fundamentally modeless: type characters to insert. I was curious about what it's like to use the modal editor after training oneself in its use.
I was quite pleasantly surprised; the naysayers were bigger morons than I thought. There are all these useful commands that can be touch-typed without any modifier keys!
Taking every key that produces a printable character and turning it into a command which inserts that character is an incredibly ill-considered decision. I mean, the machine can do anything you want, and you're insisting that it behave like a typewriter.
Because the computer/terminal keyboard traces its inspiration to the ancient typewriter, whose keys are mechanically linked to hammers that produce the characters those keys are labeled with, it must be so in a computer's editing program also. That is parochial thinking.
I don't understand how someone can go from, say, playing a game of Tetris where the unmodified keys ijkl control the falling pieces, to editing text, and suddenly insist that in this editing context, it must be that ijkl simply insert their image into the buffer. Like keys being commands is just something for games; editing is typewriter-like, so we simulate a typewriter, end of story.
Moreover, to be so vehement about this, so dead-set against the idea that an editor might be driven somewhat like a Tetris game, so as to not even give it a chance, in spite of relying on editing for enough years to become a programmer.