If you feel like remembering vim's commands is a chore then it is not for you. For me they are reaction, I don't even think about chaining then together to acco

If you feel like remembering vim's commands is a chore then it is not for you. For me they are reaction, I don't even think about chaining then together to accomplish my task. As for plugins I do not see the need for NERDTree or buffer management. At least for me searching (:find for files and :b for buffers) works perfectly fine and I dare say better/faster than file tree navigation. Multicursor is fun, but it can be achieved with a plugin in vim also, but I'd just make a macro for it. Moving lines up and down can be easily done with dd and p, so I don't see the issue here either. >competing GUI text editor There might be your problem for me using vim with tmux makes my life so much simpler than using gVim or other GUI editors.