I would classify myself as a vim power user and I agree with this take.

I think I'm probably equally as productive as a person that really knows their editor of choice. The productivity benefits mostly just come from knowing what things your editor is capable of.

However, I subjectively feel a twinge of frustration whenever I need to take my hands off the keyboard to reach for a mouse. So using vim makes a massive impact on my day to day wellbeing.

As a long-time vim user I admit this is probably true compared to modern IDEs/editors in the majority of developer workflows today. On the other hand though, if I'm logging into random servers and manipulating any kind of text, especially over a low-bandwidth, high latency connection, I'll make a VSCode user look like a kindergartner who hasn't learn to hold a pencil yet.

When I'm repeating something in a non-vim environment, it feels incredibly tedious to actually have to do the steps repeatedly instead of just pressing .

I don't care about the productivity, I do care about not doing tedious things.

It'd be interesting to do a comparison. But to your point, I don't think people use it as much for productivity gains as just the fun of it.

As someone who is a midelevel vimmer and has been using it for 20 years, that's probably true. But the muscle memory is there, and it's standard everywhere. I do get a lot of leverage out of macros and text objects, features which I'm sure have equivalents in IDEs and other editors, but I know how to use them in vim.

This is a realization I had after finally ditching Emacs / keyboard only life.

Keybindings seem to engage your brain in a different way and make the activity more fun, but I don't think it's actually any more productive.

Hotkeys with VS code can me made mostly the same right especially with Vim mode? I like the flexibility most. Little time when switching between projects or languages because it’s always Zellij, one or more nvims and a shell and ripgrep. It just feels the most comfortable at this point and it’s nice that it’s small and flexible instead of one big IDE. But yes probably people in other IDE‘s can be just as fast.

Crazy hotkey sequences, yes. Basic sequences like ci"foobar or /foo<enter>dwn... are a pretty great user experience - although it's true that your editing speed rarely determines the success or failure of the company.

I suspect this is the case, but have no hard evidence. I can see how being proficient at vim makes it feel gamified though - a clever series of commands resulting in a code change giving people that hit of dopamine.

I just hate touching my mouse if I can avoid it. NeoVim + vimium in the browser weee.

This probably applies to all tech workers.