Vim is a way of text editing that shouldn't be tied to Vim the program. I use Vim emulation with Emacs, Visual Studio, bash (to edit the command line) -- and I

Vim is a way of text editing that shouldn't be tied to Vim the program. I use Vim emulation with Emacs, Visual Studio, bash (to edit the command line) -- and I cannot imagine not having it. It's like when you see a non-tech-savvy user slowly mousing around instead of keyboard shortcuts -- that's how I feel watching non-Vim users edit text. So Vim is orthogonal to your other choices. You should get around to playing with it purely as a way to edit text properly. http://vim-adventures.com/ http://vim-adventures.com/ is a great fun way to start to get Vim powers. I'm not some old Vim user - I only picked it up a couple years ago to see what the fuss was about. I installed it into Visual Studio and left it in insert mode most of the time, then slowly got more powerful over time. Do the same with IntelliJ: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2016.2/tutorial-using-intellij-idea-as-the-vim-editor https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2016.2/tutorial-using-in.... Edit: As to your actual question, for what it's worth I started with the high-level stuff. Both in languages and tooling. The key is to always be curious about the lower levels, and work over time to understand them and move down the stack to fully understand your tools. It'd be great if there was a proper survey or study on developer effectiveness vs if they learned top-down or bottom-up.