I try to stress this more than anything when talking about the merits of vim/emacs/etc. It's not about speed, it's about how effortless and 2nd nature editing text becomes.
Which is really counterintuitive when you look at how complicated the programs are. But I felt that it became better/easier than regular text editing after only 3 weeks of fulltime use. The uninterrupted flow of keyboard use, and reduced mouse navigation, feels great.
You only need to learn a very small subset of features to be very effective with it. Some people just stick to that forever. But you can also slowly add to it.
I'm a long-time vim user, and haven't really used anything else over the past 15-20 years. I use a nice color scheme, barely any plugins and a moderate but static vimrc. I feel like this is my happy place, it let's me write with the setup I'm used to, in any terminal, on any machine, and on any codebase (JS, Python, Go, HTML, C, etc).
Every now and then I see the magic of modern text-editors (VSCode et al), especially with code completion /intellisense and file trees. For me, I rarely feel like I need to be able to complete function parameters in my code to be more productive. Code-writing takes up such a small amount of the creative process that I'm perfectly fine looking up seldom-used functions in a web-browser. I wonder if anyone has ever attempted the jump from longtime-vim-user to these and can share their stories about why or why not.
My co-founder/ collaborator has. He is a 100% vim person, to the extent that he has Firefox configured to let him do things with vim key bindings (I believe using imperator).
He's switched over to VScode with vim key bindings and has been happy as a clam. He's heavily using Python with pylance plus copilot for the python side of what we do (which is most things).
I'm an emacs user who has made a similar switch (but with a horribly weird mix of native and emacs keybindings). Oh, and the VScode sync extension for me. I use and love the rust-analyzer extension.
Switched to IntelliJ in 2018 when writing Scala. IdeaVim is fine, it even lets me switch to normal mode with jk/kj [0]. What more could I want?
I've been using IntelliJ for Scala, Elm, and Python, and still use (neo)vim for editing other languages and random files. I'm prepared to jump ship to vim+LSP on short notice.
Any advice for someone who wants to switch to vim for Go development but struggling to find a good workflow? Using vscode it's so easy to rely on the auto complete, click a function name to go to it's definition, etc. I haven't found a good guide on getting that sort of basic workflow going which is unfortunate because I would love to stop using my mouse so much.
Which is really counterintuitive when you look at how complicated the programs are. But I felt that it became better/easier than regular text editing after only 3 weeks of fulltime use. The uninterrupted flow of keyboard use, and reduced mouse navigation, feels great.
You only need to learn a very small subset of features to be very effective with it. Some people just stick to that forever. But you can also slowly add to it.