When engineers report that switching to Vim has massively improved their productivity, I can't help but think that the way they work must be very, very different from my own.

When I "program", 95% of what I do is read documentation and other technical resources, conceptualize what I want to happen, and construct the corresponding logic flow, while trying to anticipate potential problems and corner cases. In other words, most of what I do doesn't involve touching the keyboard at all.

If Vim magically tripled the speed at which I'm able to edit text, I doubt it would have a noticeable impact on my overall productivity. In fact, even if you gave me a brain-computer interface that allowed me to manipulate text at the speed of thought, it wouldn't matter much. I touch-type at around 70 WPM, which is very average, but if I two-finger typed at 15 WPM instead I would still be able to produce exactly as much code as I do today.

Simply put, text manipulation is not at all a productivity bottleneck for me. I need much more time for thinking about code than I need for writing it.

Is this really unusual? How do people operate for whom Vim gives a productivity boost? Does code just flow from their brains into their fingers? I don't get it.

I think it's rarely a productivity bottleneck, but that doesn't mean that Vim keybindings and navigation aren't superior in the vast majority of cases to what most people are doing - which is scrolling, mousing about, etc. Vim keybindings significantly accelerate the editing and browsing of existing code in-editor.

It also has the convenience of being a fairly common set of keybindings in editors nowadays, as many have an extension that gives Vim keybindings without having to go all-in on a CLI-style Vim editor.

Every modern code editor has character-, word-, subword-, line-, and page-based navigation, as well as "jump to symbol" functionality. Bookmarks, paragraph navigation, and similar are also very common.

I fail to see how Vim is supposed to be superior to that. It has essentially the same navigation features, with different keybindings. And the idea that those different keybindings are somehow "better" is a big [citation needed].

How common are the keybindings used in existing editors? I must admit I haven't ever really noticed the hotkeys/keybindings in editors - until I started using Vim bindings instead. There's likely a large crossover between people who use a lot of hotkeys and people who look into learning something like Vim. If they change often across editors, it wouldn't surprise me that they aren't often used, so don't get much evangelism compared to Vim (which has been more or less the same for decades)

I only use a small subset of Vim's shortcuts - but most text editors I've used I'd imagine don't have the breadth Vim does (or they do a really poor job of documenting it). Can you point out a doc page for some IDE with similar navigation capabilities to Vim?

> How common are the keybindings used in existing editors?

The whole point of widget toolkits is that the keybindings for input fields are the same everywhere. I use Linux and almost exclusively run GTK-based apps, and every text input across the whole system behaves the exact same way, with consistent keybindings for navigation, undo/redo, copy+paste etc. This is how good UI should work.

Platform conventions are important, and it's the job of individual programs to adapt to them – not the other way round. Vim fails big time in this regard. Can you make Firefox's form inputs use Vim keybindings? If not, there's your inconsistency already.

Do you mean something like this: https://github.com/glacambre/firenvim?