As to myself, I've been using Vim for over 10 years, yet I think it tells nothing of my proficiency with Vim. It's easy enough to become dangerous enough with Vim to surpass any past traditional editor one has used before that (excluding emacs) yet it's just as easy to let one's skills slowly plateau (as I'm surely been prone to over the years). I rarely use a pointing device while in vim/tmux (an exception is when using a lot of splits which I probably should avoid using anyway).
btw the pointing device I'm using is a trackpad mounted on top of my Kinesis Advantage keyboard which means I don't have to take my palm off the keyboard to use the mouse (it is _not_ an argument to say that despite the short distance I almost never use the mouse in vim/tmux but just a side note and a setup that I recommend if you already own a Kinesis Advantage or a similar keyboard)
Something about jumping down pages via shortcuts just feels so clunky. I lose all visual sense of my position on the page.
I keep wanting an editor plugin to scroll the page down with a single keystroke. Ie give me the visual anchoring that a scroll wheel does, but with a single key press.
Either way generally i just tent to use my mouse when i'm lightly browsing. Skimming for some code, working through a thought, etc. Jumping down pages just snaps me outa my thought process a lot of the time, because i have no clue where i am, i gotta relearn my position; where my eyes are at. Likewise jumping half a page is a bit better, but still - that instant blink where the top half of the page is gone, the previous bottom is now the top, and the bottom is now entirely new.. it just feels too.. immediate.
https://github.com/karb94/neoscroll.nvim
There is a Helix issue (and poll, see last comment) requesting the same feature you could vote on:
I spend an enormous amount of time _reading_ code and I want to move up and down quite a lot, but C-U/C-D move too fast (losing mental context) and C-E/C-Y are too slow and RSI-inducing; the wheel very easily allows you to encode an additional "velocity" dimension that the keyboard simply doesn't have.
When reading code, the mouse also allows you to navigate reasonably effectively using only one hand, leaving the other hand free for sipping coffee and taking notes.
1. Set 'scroll' to a value you're comfortable with, so that <C-D> and <C-U> move fewer lines.
2. Use a plugin that shows a scrolling animation when you use <C-D>, <C-U>, <C-F> or <C-B>. I use vim-smoothie (https://github.com/psliwka/vim-smoothie).
That explains why my coffee ends up cold and abandoned most of the time!
I like VIM, it is my favourite editor, but I can understand why some people just don't see the appeal. At least for me, the bottlenecks in productivity don't come with how fast I can type code.
Try playing some RTS games without a mouse if you want to understand why it's such a useful device in certain situations.
However, typing a few keys on the keyboard is still not as fast or as automatic as moving the mouse pointer to where your eyes are looking, IF your hand is already on the mouse (such as when scrolling around the code). Of course, if you have to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse (such as when actively editing), the opposite is usually true.
Can they beat the best mouse+keyboard gurus? I very much doubt that.
Note again that I'm only talking about navigation - when you're actively editing, you're obviously going to lose too much time moving your hand between mouse and keyboard.
I use tmux to do cut and paste, but should I ever need something out of the terminal/browser into the other, or don’t feel like C-b] ‘ing something, the mouse is great.
If your terminal supports it (iterm, kitty, later versions of gnome-terminal and others) this osc52 plugin is really sweet. It even works over ssh.
People would equate the time it takes to press 4 keys vs moving the mouse but entirely forget the mental compute time of finding a pattern, recognition, selection of first 2 chars, etc. That for me takes more time than moving the mouse.
Of course the keyword here is "practice". And just using Vim without putting effort into learning these movements doesn't make you good at them, so people using Vim for years/decades without making them second nature and thus prefering the mouse is not too surprising.
Mouse is instant in terms of brain compute.
I spend solid 6 hours a day on vim. Almost every day. I don't look at the keyboard or what I am typing. I don't even think about what I am typing.
However, searching for 2 letters is a constant time operation and cannot be optimized away with repetition. You still need to go search for a word that starts with "ha" if you're trying to moving to a word "hackernews". THAT takes time and mental compute. This is very different from not looking at keyboard keys or your argument about a pianist.
Whatever that search time is exceeds the ease of using a mouse (for me). Trust me, it is not about practice.