To me, it's just that text editing becomes way more efficient when you can accomplish everything without reaching for the mouse. The great thing about Vi (and

To me, it's just that text editing becomes way more efficient when you can accomplish everything without reaching for the mouse. The great thing about Vi (and I presume Emacs as well) is that you can get keybindings for just about any IDE. I use Visual Studio for intellisense, but I install VsVim which gives it 90% of the most commonly used features of Vim. XCode has XVim. IntelliJ products have IdeaVim. I've used them all, they're all great. It's nice to be able to feel instantly at home in any editor.