Text editors, though, are really only one tool. There's plenty of different "tools" and other things to have a mastery understanding of, and I've never seen any proof that you need to be a vim golf pro to write amazing code. If that was the case, clearly our interviews should be all about text editing ;)
In all seriousness, I personally see marginal at best benefit to getting better at text editors. I do occasionally learn things that improve my workflow, but I prefer to spend time on other things, there's enough subjects I'll already never know as much as I'd wish about...
I must say I disagree. Having some control over the tools is certainly of benefit. Yet my experience certainly was, that the greatest people I met were sometimes surprisingly slow with the tools they used.
This is because what really seems to matter is their prespective at things and what decisions they take then.
Sure knowing their tools inside out will make them faster, but it is not the KEY thing of why you would take them over every other person. Unless of course your job very focused on these tools (e.g. hand crafting etc) and even there knowledge often trumps tools.
Tools are just tools. If you look at a Cameraperson at a movie set, you will see it even more so. A young guy who knows that 50k€ Arri Alexa inside out might be ending up making worse images than that old fart who just knows where to put it and how to press record. That young guy would be a perfect camera assistant tho. Making pictures is not the camera, just like writing code is not the editor.
If I manage to get to the same thing as you, it doesn't matter if I use notepad.exe, a typewriter or pen and paper, unless it takes me ten times as long. But nearly none of the time consuming problems I had with code were ever due to the fact that my editor slowed me down, but rather that I wasn't aware of parts of my code.
I aknowledge however that people are different, and maybe it could be distracting if your editor is to slow depending on the type of person you are. I also like smooth workflows where things don't get in my way also in vim, but there is a threshold above which it bascially won't matter anymore.
Skill of your too directly impacts your ability to complete a task. If you struggle to prep food for cooking, you're going to be slower and probably less effective than the master chef who doesn't even have to think about how to dice.
But I'll agree with you in this way - there are a lot of people who want to just get good at their tools (huge vimrc that's mostly unused) and don't care about how well they actually write code. I think it stems from procrastinating.
> If you struggle to prep food for cooking, you're going to be slower and probably less effective than the master chef who doesn't even have to think about how to dice.
This analogy is not good in that prepping is a major part of the complete task. To fix the analogy, consider the same scenario, but prepping now takes only 2 minutes per complete meal and can be cut down to 30 seconds given years of training.
From my experience, people who are good at their trade tend to know their tools very well. They may not use the best tools, but they use the ones they have to their fullest. The people who aren't very good at their trade but want to appear like they're good use the flashiest tools, but they don't know those tools to their fullest. They may know of a lot of the features, but they don't use them consistently.
It doesn't really matter what tools you choose, provided you know them well and they're well suited for your work.
Now that I gave the whole thing another thought, it might be very different for different professions.
Maybe we also got it upside down? What if experts tend to be good with their tools, because they had a ton of experience with them and not the other way round. So they are not experts because they use their tools well, but they use tools well because they had a lot of time spent with these.
That is, if you are in a profession were the tools stay the same. The sound mixers I mentioned certainly know SOME workflows inside out, but mixing desks change and differ between manufacturers, get more modern etc. That means judging a sound mixer purely by his ability to handle a certain mixing desk on one point in time might not be completely representative of the man/woman’s abilities.
For programming it is much the same. A perfectly guru programmer could have switched to vim just months ago, while anoob could have invedted a year into learning vim instead of gaining experience with code.
I've seen (very) competent programmers at varying degrees of tool mastery. If we're talking text editing tools at least.
I don't consider text editing speed that important to my programming productivity. I like things that help me comprehend code, like syntax highlighting and being able to easily jump to definitions or a tool tip telling me what arguments a function needs.
This is not directed at you particularly, but when I see people say they are faster at navigating the cursor with hjkl than the arrow keys, I can't help but roll my eyes. I'm pretty comfortable with navigating text in Vim. It's great how little strain it puts on your arms to not have to reach for your mouse. But overall the mouse is such a superior pointing device, and I have to use it for tons of other stuff anyway, that I feel like I'm putting a lot less overall strain on myself by using a "normal" modern non-modal editor.
I've used Vim for years. But after forcing myself to learn to use the mouse for text editing tasks, I'm actually in the Zone a lot more often. I almost feel like a 10x-er in comparison to my Vim years.