It's not really a matter of saving time, but eliminating friction (context-switches). Editing is a chore, and fiddling with text while taking notes, or debuggin

It's not really a matter of saving time, but eliminating friction (context-switches). Editing is a chore, and fiddling with text while taking notes, or debugging, or thinking about a problem, has a cost. It's also quite alarming to reach a level of proficiency where you can make non-trivial edits without looking at what you're editing, and know that the edits are correct. Again, this avoids context-switches. That's why Vim is so focused on precision ("do exactly this") rather than DWIM ("Do What I Mean [usually]": the emacs/IDE approach). Certainly whether the ramp-up cost is worth the "payoff" is debatable, but for me, editing text became so irritating that my initial experiments with Vim were driven from pure exhaustion after years of blub-craft.