When you are learning programming, its important to be able to isolate the problem you are working on and focus on that. The fact is that vim has a steep learn

When you are learning programming, its important to be able to isolate the problem you are working on and focus on that. The fact is that vim has a steep learning curve, and no matter how fast you are at typing things, your rate of productivity is still limited by how fast you can make decisions and how fast you can think and solve problems. I strongly believe that mastering hotkeys and tools like vim is the final stage of achieving the highest levels of programming skill. This is because once you have learned so much and trained yourself hard to think and move really fast, only then does your productivity bottleneck become things like using the mouse too much, not knowing certain hotkeys, not using things like regex replace, multi-line edit, and so on. The problem is mastering a single tool requires a tremendous amount of investment of time and energy, and once you are at the point in your development as a programmer where you need to start improving on hotkeys, well you are already deeply invested in whatever tool you are using and making the switch to vim has a major cost associated with it, because now you have to learn everything you already know how to do all over again. Is this cost worth it? Sometimes, depending on how advanced a person is, other times, depending on the situation, it's not. I think this phenomenon explains a lot about why vim is not as popular as perhaps it deserves to be.