Comment by NalNezumi

I use vim & vim bindings for most editors I have (VS Code, Obsidian) and I think there's one thing always missed in this conversation (at least on HN): The changes that happens in your thinking when you start using a tool. Instead we get stuck on pros/cons of tool A vs tool B.

I got in to vim in college for two reasons (the real) one was just that I wanted to look cool, and the second one was to relive my hands of discomfort. It was also around the same time I started to look in to QWERTY vs Colemak vs Dvorak, although I didn't go further with that, I quickly realized that the keyboard layout of my country (Sweden), while similar to US/UK QWERTY placed brackets in absolute garbage positions that caused strain in my right hand a lot. Then also the excessive pressing of left/right arrow + moving right hand between mouse & keyboard caused further strain.

Vim alleviated that with the word/Word/sentence navigation being more spread out, and "stick to home-row" philosophy.

But there was an additional "shift of thinking": editor as a (limited) programming language. Being able to store macros, navigate depending not just on line/character but chunks such as word & sentences made me realize I could do things such as:

"In this XML/URDF file, replace all elements with the name=X with the logic Y, which might including adding/removing xml elements/attribute"

without having to use some scripting (python + parsing etc). The process of figuring that out is also interactive. Try out a bunch of commands, stitch them together as "macros" and then make macros that calls macros that use copy-paste registry.

If I stuck with Sublime, or VS Code, I don't think I would've had that epiphany. It even helped me (non-CS guy) to understand programming better.