Yes, it’s super handy to be able to record an Emacs macro and modify large text within seconds, something that would take me half an hour. Yes, it’s super cool to navigate text at lightning speed.

But honestly, I have seen engineers who work with the mouse to navigate, and use nano to edit text in the terminal, and IDEs from intelliJ to navigate their codebase, engineers who were 10x as productive as I was. Why? Because in the end navigating your text is not what determines engineering success. It’s convenient, yes, but that’s not the core challenge. These days devs using VS Code can be magnitudes more productive just because they focus on the things that matter.

Edit:

Don’t get me wrong. I love my (mechanical) keyboard. I hardly use the mouse. I have a shortcut for everything using Keyboard Maestro, Karabiner elements, and I use Emacs for text editing, and all of that makes me super fast using my computer. But all of that does not make you a better engineer (I am not an engineer anyway). So spending time on other qualities (being able to do research, to solve problems, to manage knowledge, to communicate well, to document well) is way more relevant for your success as an engineer.