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Surely if you need to pack reformating, moving, copying and deleting code into as short a time as possible you're doing it wrong even more than if you had to insert a lot of text!

This leaves navigating as the main reason for vi's UI. And macros, apparently. If that's what you want, great, but it's not for me.

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As others have said: You didn't learn touch-typing to churn out text as fast as possible. You learned it because it creates a more direct interface between brain and machine. It doesn't hinder your toughts, doesn't break the concentration.

It's the same with vim editing: The idea is not to be able to move code around as fast as possible but to do it without thinking. It's a step closer to the perfect brain-reading computer with which writing code is only a matter of imaging it.

For a new code base, you might be right. As code bases grow, so does cruft - and the older the code gets, the more it requires moving things around just so before you can add new items.

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