I can't say I agree. To me this is equivalent to saying "I have way more music in my head than I have room for and I can't afford to expend more than about 0.0001% of context on a piano". The tool you use for 8+ hours a day is extremely important and even small gains will pay dividends over the long run. The more efficiently the text editor allows you to do tasks, the more time you have to think about other tasks.

Bill Joy, the original author of vi, saw the vi commands as a problem, not a solution [1]:

    The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn't have a mouse and therefore you've got all these commands. In some sense, its backwards from the kind of thing you'd get from a mouse-oriented thing.

But I made the switch to nvim / LazyVim. And it is actually pretty good. I had in mind those endless hours of config and lua scripting. At the end of the day all I needed actually was to remove a plugin (folke, which messes with my 's' key) and learn to use the package manager to setup the languages I wanted.

Having things like GrugFAR or lazygit at the tip of my finger is actually a quality of life improvement. I could do without those for sure but they fit my workflow and muscle memory well.

Still wish there was something better for ansible ; I should have gone with pyinfra with my current job's project but I only learned about it after writing 12k LoCs of ansible :'(

But then I discovered https://www.lazyvim.org/. Turns your copy of NeoVim into an IDE.

I still haven't edited the default config much, actually. But now I'm probably 2x to 3x as productive in vim (nvim, now) as before.

P.S. If you decide to check out the LazyVim config, I highly recommend reading https://lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/ all the way through. There's a lot of new keybindings to learn, but Dusty Phillips's book gives you a gentle on-ramp to learning most of them.

Once in a while I will mistakenly dump a string of keystrokes into insert mode or another application. That literal output always amazes me because the construction of those strings is so far removed from my brain's "main thread".

The inverse is if I try to write a helper function or explain to someone else how I did something they observed and I need to methodically document each action. It's like trying to describe how to walk or something.

I tried nvim integration but it was half-baked and I can't even use nvim as an editor because they removed cscope support. nvi back in the day also dropped support for cscope because it wasn't vi enough. Hell, there is barely a working source repository for it. Only vim supports it out of the box. Am I the only person using cscope in 2026?

As of current day, I only use vim with no plugins to edit source code.

The existence of vim classic would be hard to explain without reference to LLMs.

That advice was not entirely accurate (sometimes vi is in /usr/bin/vi, for example), and the merging of /bin with /usr/bin has made it kind of a moot point. (EDIT to add: Though the fact that busybox includes a basic vi implementation has kind of un-mooted the point, actually). But I first started learning vi because I figured I would need it professionally, and when the modal-editing workflow "clicked" for me, I figured out that I had just learned the editor I would want to stick with for years.

And although vim replaced vi and nvim replaced vim in my finger-macros, that has remained true to this day.

Also, I have not been following the d2d development of vim closely after Bram's passing but I can't help but wonder what he'd have thought about this approach to development of vim.

Seems like an interesting fact for those who don't follow the development of vim/neovim.

I'm a GUI user too but using helix-mode (like vim-mode but IMO more intuitive) in my GUI editor, zed, gives me the benefits of both.